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

Terraform

Terraform is an open source software solution for declarative infrastructure management. It allows you to express and manage the desired state of your infrastructure with code. It has gained initial popularity as a framework to automate public cloud infrastructure but now supports a variety of on-premises and public cloud resources, platforms, services—almost anything that has an API.

One of the key distinctions of Terraform is the way it manages state. Once it creates a remote resource initially, it saves the resulting state in a file and relies on that state to be there for its next runs. As you update and develop your infrastructure code, the state file enables Terraform to manage the entire life cycle of a remote resource, calculating the precise sequence of API calls to transition between states. This ability to manage state and the declarative configuration language and the agentless, API-first architecture allowed Terraform to become deeply entrenched in...