Thrift is a large IDL and transport package from Apache, popularized by Facebook. Thrift is well-supported in Go kit, for organizations that already have significant Thrift investment. And using Thrift with Go kit is very simple.
First, define your service in the Thrift IDL. The Thrift IDL documentation provides more details. See addsvc.thrift for an example. Make sure the Thrift definition matches your service's Go kit (interface) definition.
Next, download Thrift and install the compiler.
On a Mac, you may be able to brew install thrift.
Then, compile your service definition, from .thrift to .go. You'll probably want to specify the package_prefix option to the --gen go flag. See THRIFT-3021 for more details.
thrift -r --gen go:package_prefix=github.com/my-org/my-repo/thrift/gen-go/ add.thrift
Finally, write a tiny binding from your service definition to the Thrift definition. It's a straightforward conversion from one domain to the other. See thrift.go for an example.
That's it! The Thrift binding can be bound to a listener and serve normal Thrift requests. And within your service, you can use standard Go kit components and idioms. Unfortunately, setting up a Thrift listener is rather laborious and nonidiomatic in Go. Fortunately, addsvc is a complete working example with Thrift support. And remember: Go kit services can support multiple transports simultaneously.