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

Ansible

Ansible is an open source project, framework, and automation platform. Its descriptive automation language has captured the attention of many network engineers who see it as an introduction with minimal friction into the world of network automation and something that can help them become productive relatively quickly.

Ansible has an agentless push-based architecture. It connects to the hosts it manages via SSH and runs a series of tasks. These tasks are small programs that we call Ansible modules, which are the units of code that Ansible abstracts away from the user. A user only has to give the input arguments and can rely on Ansible modules to do all the heavy work for them. Although the level of abstraction may vary, Ansible modules allow users to focus more on the desired state of their infrastructure and less on the individual commands required to achieve that state.

Overview of Ansible components

Playbooks are at the core of Ansible. These text-based declarative...