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

What is a testing environment?

The primary goal is to build an environment with the right set of hardware and software that meets the minimum requirements to execute the code examples. We base the requirements on the assumption that you’re deploying a virtual machine (VM), as we realize you might not deploy this on a dedicated bare-metal server.

When it comes to deploying a VM for testing (testbed), you have two options, both of which we discuss later:

  • You can deploy this VM in a self-hosted environment, such as VMware or Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
  • You could use a cloud-hosted environment—for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

From the hardware perspective, we assume that the underlying CPU architecture is 64-bit x86, and our recommendation is to give the VM at least 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM and ideally double that to make things a bit faster.

We describe all software provisioning and configuration in an Ansible playbook included in...