Book Image

Go for DevOps

By : John Doak, David Justice
5 (1)
Book Image

Go for DevOps

5 (1)
By: John Doak, David Justice

Overview of this book

Go is the go-to language for DevOps libraries and services, and without it, achieving fast and safe automation is a challenge. With the help of Go for DevOps, you'll learn how to deliver services with ease and safety, becoming a better DevOps engineer in the process. Some of the key things this book will teach you are how to write Go software to automate configuration management, update remote machines, author custom automation in GitHub Actions, and interact with Kubernetes. As you advance through the chapters, you'll explore how to automate the cloud using software development kits (SDKs), extend HashiCorp's Terraform and Packer using Go, develop your own DevOps services with gRPC and REST, design system agents, and build robust workflow systems. By the end of this Go for DevOps book, you'll understand how to apply development principles to automate operations and provide operational insights using Go, which will allow you to react quickly to resolve system failures before your customers realize something has gone wrong.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Up and Running with Go
10
Section 2: Instrumenting, Observing, and Responding
14
Section 3: Cloud ready Go

Using os/exec to automate local changes

Automating the execution of tools that are local to the machine can provide a series of benefits to end users. The first of these is that it can reduce the toil that your team experiences. One of the primary goals for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) is to remove repetitive, manual processes. That time can be put to better use by reading a good book (such as this one), organizing a sock drawer, or working on the next problem. The second benefit is to remove manual mistakes from a process. It is easy to type the wrong thing or copy and paste something incorrectly. And finally, it is the core underpinning of operating at scale. Automating locally can be combined with other techniques detailed in the book to make changes at a large scale.

The automation life cycle generally comes in three stages, moving from manually doing work to automation, as follows:

  1. The first stage revolves around the manual execution of commands by an...