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

Functions

On the surface, Go functions are exactly the same as in any other programming language: a section of code designed to perform a certain task grouped into a re-usable container. Thanks to the static nature of the language, all functions have a signature that defines the number and types of acceptable input arguments and output values.

Consider the following function (generateName) that generates a new name based on a pair of input strings (base, suffix). You can find the full code of the next example at ch03/functions1/main.go.

func generateName(base string, suffix string) string {
    parts := []string{base, suffix}
    return strings.Join(parts, "-")
}
 
func main() {
    s := generateName("device", "01")
 
    // prints "device-01"
    fmt.Println(s)
}

This function’s signature is func (string, string) string, meaning that it accepts two arguments of type string and returns another string. You can assign the returned value to...