Book Image

Network Automation with Go

By : Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin
Book Image

Network Automation with Go

By: Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin

Overview of this book

Go’s built-in first-class concurrency mechanisms make it an ideal choice for long-lived low-bandwidth I/O operations, which are typical requirements of network automation and network operations applications. This book provides a quick overview of Go and hands-on examples within it to help you become proficient with Go for network automation. It’s a practical guide that will teach you how to automate common network operations and build systems using Go. The first part takes you through a general overview, use cases, strengths, and inherent weaknesses of Go to prepare you for a deeper dive into network automation, which is heavily reliant on understanding this programming language. You’ll explore the common network automation areas and challenges, what language features you can use in each of those areas, and the common software tools and packages. To help deepen your understanding, you’ll also work through real-world network automation problems and apply hands-on solutions to them. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Go and have a solid grasp on network automation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Go Programming Language
6
Part 2: Common Tools and Frameworks
10
Part 3: Interacting with APIs

RESTCONF

The IETF designed RESTCONF as an HTTP-based alternative to NETCONF that offers Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on a conceptual datastore containing YANG-modeled data. It may lack some NETCONF features, such as different datastores, exclusive configuration locking, and batch and rollback operations, but the exact set of supported and unsupported features depends on the implementation and network device capabilities. That said, because it uses HTTP methods and supports JSON encoding, RESTCONF reduces the barrier of entry for external systems to integrate and inter-operate with a network device.

RESTCONF supports a standard set of CRUD operations through HTTP methods: POST, PUT, PATCH, GET, and DELETE. RESTCONF builds HTTP messages with the YANG XPath translated into a REST-like URI and it transports the payload in the message body. Although RESTCONF supports both XML and JSON encoding, we will only focus on the latter, with the rules of the encoding defined...