Networking and Go

Go is widely used in generic infrastructure software—from workload orchestration (Docker and Kubernetes), through telemetry and monitoring (Prometheus and Grafana), all the way to automation tooling (Terraform and Vagrant).

Networking is not the exception—some notable networking projects using Go include Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins such as Cilium or Calico, routing protocol daemons such as GoBGP and Bio-RD, virtual private network (VPN) software such as Tailscale, and most of OpenConfig's ecosystem, including projects such as gRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) and goyang.

Other use cases include cloud and network services, command-line interfaces (CLIs), web development, development-operations (DevOps), and site reliability.

Go is a programming language the Go founders created to address modern challenges such as multi-core processing, distributed systems, and large-scale software development from day one.

Go's built-in first-class concurrency mechanisms make it an ideal choice for long-lived low-bandwidth input/output (I/O) operations, which are typical requirements of network automation and network operations applications.

What makes the Go language so appealing to software developers? Why, out of all the programming languages out there, should you invest time in learning Go? This is what we address in the next section.