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

Systems approach

As you start automating different tasks with an incremental approach, you may envision a path where you chain a subset of these automated tasks together to orchestrate a workflow.

You can also look at this from a different angle. You initially break down your existing manual processes into smaller chunks of work that you can automate independently, so you don’t need to wait until you get the full end-to-end process automated to start taking advantage of automation, while at the same time you are mindful of the bigger picture.

In this context, you take the first steps to interconnect different building blocks, which become part of a larger system that delivers a business outcome with eventually no human intervention that originally may have involved several teams. That’s what we call a systems approach.

One common example is when you mix the processes of configuring network services and collecting operational data from the network, which is what...