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

The Go tool

One of the convenient things about Go – as a programming language – is that a single tool handles all interactions with, and operations on, the source code. When installing Go, make sure that the go tool is in the searchable OS path so that you can invoke it from any command-line terminal. The user experience, regardless of the OS or platform architecture, is uniform and doesn't require any customization when moving from one machine to another.

IDEs also use the go tool to build and run code, report errors, and automatically format Go source code. The go executable accepts a verb as the first argument that determines what go tool function to apply to Go source files:

$ go 
Go is a tool for managing Go source code.
Usage:
     go <command> [arguments]
The commands are:
     bug         start a bug report
     build       compile packages and dependencies
     ...       
     mod         module maintenance
     run         compile and run Go program...