Implementing Graceful Shutdown in Go HTTP Servers

When you kill an HTTP server with SIGKILL, every in-flight request dies instantly. If your handler was halfway through writing to a database, you get partial writes. If it was streaming a large file, the client gets a broken download with no error message. This is not a theoretical edge case — it happens every time you deploy or restart without a proper shutdown sequence.

Why abrupt shutdown breaks production systems

kill -9 and docker stop without a timeout both send SIGKILL, which terminates the process unconditionally.…