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

Input and Output Operations

A common operation in a program is to move data around and to reformat it. For example, you can open a file, load its content in memory, encode it to a different format, maybe jpeg, and then write it to a file on the disk. This is where the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces play a key role in Go's I/O model, as they allow you to stream data from a source to a destination via a transfer buffer. This means you don't need to load the entire file in memory to encode it and write it to the destination, making the process more efficient.

The io.Reader Interface

The io package in the standard library defines one of the most popular interfaces in Go, the io.Reader interface, which can read a stream of bytes (p). It returns the number of bytes read (n) and any error encountered (err).

type Reader interface {
    Read(p []byte) (n int, err error)
}

Any concrete type that has a method Read with this signature implements the io.Reader interface. You don&...