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Go for DevOps
Go for DevOps

Go for DevOps : Learn how to use the Go language to automate servers, the cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, Packer, and Terraform

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Profile Icon John Doak Profile Icon David Justice
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.5 (16 Ratings)
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Go for DevOps

Go Language Basics

DevOps is a concept that has been floating around since the early 2000s. It is a popularization of an operations discipline that relies on programming skills with development psychology popularized by Agile.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is now considered a subdiscipline of DevOps, though it is likely the precursor to DevOps and relies more heavily on software skills and Service - Level Obligation (SLO)/Service - Level Agreement (SLA) modeling.

During my early time at Google, like many of today's DevOps shops, we used Python heavily. I think C++ was too painful for many SREs, and we had Python celebrities in Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli.

But, as time wore on, many of the groups working in Python started having scaling issues. This included everything from Python running out of memory (requiring us to hack in our own malloc) to the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) preventing us from true multithreading. At scale, we found that the lack of static types was giving us an abundance of errors that should have been caught at compile time. This mirrored what production services had seen years before.

But, Python came with more than compile-time and service-scaling issues. Simply moving to a new version of Python in the fleet might cause a service to stop working. The Python version run on Google machines would often get upgraded and expose bugs in your code that the previous version did not. Unlike a compiled binary, you could not just roll back to an old version.

Several of us in different organizations were looking to solve these types of problems without having to use C++. For my personal journey, I heard about Go from my colleagues in our Sydney office (Hey, Ross!). It was the pre-1.0 days, but they said it was already showing a lot of promise. I can't say I was even remotely convinced that what we needed was another language.

About 6 months later, however, I had bought Go hook, line, and sinker. It had everything we needed without everything we didn't. Now, it was still pre-1.0 days, so there was a certain amount of churn back then that was unpleasant (such as finding that Russ Cox had changed the time package over the weekend, so I had to rewrite a bunch of code). But, the benefits after writing my first service were undeniable.

I spent the next 4 years moving my department from a complete Python shop to almost a complete Go shop. I started teaching classes in Go across the world, targeted at operations engineers, rewriting core libraries for Go, and evangelizing to what was probably an annoying amount. Just because Go was invented at Google, it didn't mean that the engineers wanted to throw away their Python code and learn something new; there was more than a little resistance.

Now, Go has become the de facto language for cloud orchestration and software in the larger world (from Kubernetes to Docker). Go comes with all the tools you need to make huge strides in the reliability of your tooling and ability to scale.

Because many of these cloud services are written in Go, their parts are available to you by accessing their packages for your own tooling needs. This can make writing tooling for the cloud an easier experience.

For the next two chapters, I will be sharing my 10+ years' experience of teaching Go to engineers around the world to give you the basics and essentials of the Go language. Much of what you will read here is based on my free Go basics video training course, https://www.golangbasics.com. This course will differ slightly from that one in that it is more condensed. As you work your way through the book, we will continue to extend your knowledge of the Go language's standard library and third-party packages.

This chapter will cover the following main topics:

  • Using the Go Playground
  • Utilizing Go packages
  • Using Go's variable types
  • Looping in Go
  • Using conditionals
  • Learning about functions
  • Defining public and private
  • Using arrays and slices
  • Getting to know about structs
  • Understanding Go pointers
  • Comprehending Go interfaces

Now, let's get the basics down and get you on your way!

Technical requirements

The only technical requirement for this chapter is a modern web browser for using the Go Playground.

Using the Go Playground

The Go Playground, which you can find at https://play.golang.org/, is an online code editor and compiler that allows you to run Go code without installing Go on your machine. This is the perfect tool for our introductory chapters, allowing you to save your work online without the initial fuss of installing the Go tooling, or finding a code editor, for example.

There are four important parts of the Go Playground:

  • The code editing pane
  • The console window
  • The Run button
  • The Share button

The code editing pane, which is the yellow portion of the page, allows you to type in the Go code for your program. When you hit the Run button, the code will be compiled and then run with the output sent to the console, which is the white portion of the page below the code editor.

The following screen shows a glimpse of what the Go Playground does:

Figure 1.1 – Go Playground code editor

Figure 1.1 – Go Playground code editor

Clicking the Share button will store an immutable copy of the code and will change the URL from play.golang.org into a shareable link, such as play.golang.org/p/HmnNoBf0p1z. This link is a unique URL that you can bookmark and share with others. The code in this link cannot be changed, but if you hit the Share button again, it will create a new link with any changes.

Later chapters, starting with Chapter 4, Filesystem Interaction, will require installing the Go tooling for your platform.

This section taught you about the Go Playground and how to use it to write, view, share, and run your Go code. The Playground will be used extensively throughout the book to share runnable code examples.

Now, let's jump into writing Go code, starting with how Go defines packages.

Utilizing Go packages

Go provides reusable blocks of code that can be imported into other code using packages. Packages in Go are synonymous with libraries or modules in other languages. Packages are the building blocks of Go programs that divide the content into understandable parts.

This section will cover how to declare and import a package. We will discuss how to deal with package name conflicts, explore rules around packages, and we will write our first main package.

Declaring a package

Go divides programs into packages, sometimes called modules or libraries in other languages. Packages live on a path, and the path is made to look like a path to a directory on a Unix-like filesystem.

All Go files in a directory must belong to the same package. The package is most commonly named the same as the directory it lives in.

Declaring a package happens at the top of the file, and should only be preceded by a comment. Declaring a package is as simple as the following:

// Package main is the entrance point for our binary.
// The double slashes provides a comment until the end of the line.
/*
This is a comment that lasts until the closing star slash.
*/
package main

package main is special. All other package names declare a package that must be imported into another package to be used. package main will declare func main(), which is the starting point for a binary to run.

All Go files in a directory must have the same package header (compiler-enforced). These files, for most practical purposes, act as if they are concatenated together.

Let's say you have a directory structure as follows:

mypackage/
  file1.go
  file2.go

Then, file1.go and file2.go should have the following:

package mypackage

When mypackage is imported by another package, it will include everything declared in all files in the mypackage directory.

Importing a package

There are two general types of packages:

  • The standard library (stdlib) packages
  • All other packages

Standard library packages stand out because they don't list some repository information in their path, such as the following:

"fmt"
"encoding/json"
"archive/zip"

All other packages generally have repository information preceding them, as follows:

"github.com/johnsiilver/golib/lru"
"github.com/kylelemons/godebug/pretty"

Note

A complete listing of stdlib packages can be found at the following link: https://golang.org/pkg/.

To import packages, we use the import keyword. So, let's import the standard library fmt package and the mypackage package, which lives at github.com/devopsforgo/mypackage:

package main
import (
     "fmt"
     "github.com/devopsforgo/mypackage"
)

It is important to note that the filenames are not part of the package path, but simply the directory path.

Using a package

Once you've imported a package, you can start accessing functions, types, or variables declared in the package by prefacing what you want to access with the name of the package and a period.

For example, the fmt package has a function called Println() that can be used to print a line to stdout. If we want to use it, it is as simple as the following:

fmt.Println("Hello!")

Package name conflicts

Let's say you have two packages named mypackage. They both have the same name, so our program won't be able to tell which one we are referring to. You can rename a package import into whatever name you want:

import(
     "github.com/devopsforgo/mypackage"
     jpackage "github.com/johnsiilver/mypackage"
)

jpackage declares that in this package, we will refer to github.com/johnsiilver/mypackage as jpackage.

This ability allows us to use two similarly named packages as follows:

mypackage.Print()
jpackage.Send()

Now, we will look at an important rule around packages that improves compile-time and binary size.

Packages must be used

Let's introduce you to the following rule: If you import a package, you must use it.

One of the things that the Go authors noticed about many of the other programming languages being used at Google was that they often had unused imports.

This was leading to compile times that were longer than needed and, in some cases, binary sizes that were much bigger than required. Python files were packaged in a proprietary format to ship around production, and some of these unused imports were adding hundreds of megabytes to the files.

To prevent these types of problems, Go will not compile a program that imports a package but doesn't use it, as shown here:

package main
import (
     "fmt"
     "sync"
)
func main() {
     fmt.Println("Hello, playground")
}

The preceding code outputs the following:

./prog.go:5:2: imported and not used: "sync"

In certain rare circumstances, you may need to do a side effects import, in which just loading the package causes something to happen, but you don't use the package. This should always be done in package main and requires prepending with an underscore (_):

package main
import (
     "fmt"
     _ "sync" //Just an example 
)
func main() {
     fmt.Println("Hello, playground")
}

Next, we will declare a main package and discuss the basics of writing a Go program that imports a package.

A Go Hello World

Let's write a simple hello world program that is similar to the default program in the Go Playground. This example will demonstrate the following:

  • Declaring a package
  • Importing the fmt package from the standard library, which can print to our screen
  • Declaring the main() function of a program
  • Declaring a string variable using the := operator
  • Printing the variable to the screen

Let's see what this looks like:

1 package main
2 
3 import "fmt"
4
5 func main() {
6    hello := "Hello World!"
7    fmt.Println(hello)
8
9 }

In our first line, we declared the name of our package using the package keyword. The entrance point for any Go binary is a package named main that has a function called main().

In our third line, we import the fmt package. fmt has functions for doing string formatting and writing to various outputs.

On our fifth line, we declare a function called main that takes no arguments and returns no values. main() is special, as when a binary is run, it starts by running the main() function.

Go uses {} to show where a function starts and where a function ends (similar to C).

The sixth line declares a variable named hello using the := operator. This operator indicates that we wish to create a new variable and assign it a value in a single line. This is the most common, but not the only, way to declare a variable.

As Go is typed, so := will assign the type based on the value. In this case, it will be a string, but if the value was an integer (such as 3), it would be the int type, and if a floating-point (such as 2.4), it would be the float64 type. If we wanted to declare a specific type, such as int8 or float32, we would need some modifications (which we will talk about later).

On the seventh line, we call a function that is in the fmt package called Println. Println() will print the contents of the hello variable to stdout followed by a new line character (\n).

You will notice that the way to use a function declared in another package is to use the package name (without quotes) + a period + the name of the function. In this case, fmt.Println().

In this section, you have learned how to declare a package, import a package, what the function of the main package is, and how to write a basic Go program with a variable declaration. In the next section, we will go into some depth on declaring and using variables.

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Key benefits

  • Develop the skills to build command-line tools to control thousands of nodes
  • Use Go to create Terraform providers and GitHub actions and extend Kubernetes
  • Gain the knowledge to build DevOps workflows that are understandable, scalable, and safe

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for Ops and DevOps engineers who would like to use Go to develop their own DevOps tooling or integrate custom features with DevOps tools such as Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, HashiCorp Packer, and Terraform. Experience with some type of programming language, but not necessarily Go, is necessary to get started with this book.

What you will learn

  • Understand the basic structure of the Go language to begin your DevOps journey
  • Interact with filesystems to read or stream data
  • Communicate with remote services via REST and gRPC
  • Explore writing tools that can be used in the DevOps environment
  • Develop command-line operational software in Go
  • Work with popular frameworks to deploy production software
  • Create GitHub actions that streamline your CI/CD process
  • Write a ChatOps application with Slack to simplify production visibility

Product Details

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Publication date : Jul 08, 2022
Length: 634 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781801818896
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Length: 634 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781801818896
Vendor :
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Table of Contents

21 Chapters
Section 1: Getting Up and Running with Go Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 1: Go Language Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 2: Go Language Essentials Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 3: Setting Up Your Environment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 4: Filesystem Interactions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 5: Using Common Data Formats Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 6: Interacting with Remote Data Sources Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 7: Writing Command-Line Tooling Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 8: Automating Command-Line Tasks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 2: Instrumenting, Observing, and Responding Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 9: Observability with OpenTelemetry Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 10: Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 11: Using ChatOps to Increase Efficiency Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 3: Cloud ready Go Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 12: Creating Immutable Infrastructure Using Packer Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 13: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 14: Deploying and Building Applications in Kubernetes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 15: Programming the Cloud Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Chapter 16: Designing for Chaos Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.5
(16 Ratings)
5 star 75%
4 star 12.5%
3 star 6.3%
2 star 0%
1 star 6.3%
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Thomas Niu Feb 06, 2024
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Feefo Verified review Feefo
Amazon Customer Aug 08, 2022
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book is very well written and the selection of topics is spot one. Bravo!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Tiny Oct 14, 2022
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
If you need to upgrade your current Go proficiency to work in the new development environment, “Go for Devops” Packt, by John Doak and David Justice can help. The book does an excellent job reintroducing the reader to go basics, building out observability solutions, and then migrating those solutions onto the cloud. Each section provides an extensive code-base and real-world examples to help learn the best solutions. My own Go skills have been lacking and I found the first section extremely helpful. It covers from language basics to command line tooling with all the intermediate sections to build file-structures and connect to remote resources. These skills play in later when needed to construct environments on cloud-providers and detail the observability aspects required by DevOps. If you don’t have the basic skills, you can’t move to advanced options and this does a credible job covering down on those basics. My favorite part of the middle section was the connection with existing tools. I don’t know any developers that haven’t used GitHub as a core piece so learning to automate workflows with GitHub builds a much needed skill-set. I also use Open Telemetry extensively myself to help send the right data to the right places so seeing it covered here was useful. Even further, the authors point out the ability to integrate OWASP’s Zap, and then the Jaeger tool with OTel to show results effectively. The last part builds to infrastructure as code with Terraform and then expand into Azure. This is a good spot for a joke, Do you know why there is no DevOps on Mars? It hasn’t been terraformed. With that, terraform is a key piece of most DevOps infrastructure so the inclusion here is valuable. Past terraform, the authors build some container solutions with Kubernetes and explain how to construct an Azure environment. Each of these steps helps the advanced user build and monitor a DevOps environment to continuous generate code for production. My chief complaint was I was really looking forward to the chapter on Chaos. I thought it would be some interesting takes on doing Chaos engineering against Go code for my CI/CD pipelines. The chapter did offer some best practices, but more in line with standard approaches than a detailed Chaos look. All in all, not too bad of a downer for an otherwise great book. This book provides a great, intermediate look at using Go in your DevOps process. While it does not exclusively focus on DevOps approaches, the integration with the various code aspects will certainly improve your overall code development. I recommend this for anyone working development in Go with an interest in expanding their knowledge to infrastructure as code.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
R. D. Mann Jul 16, 2022
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Sure, I am (the first person) listed in the acknowledgement from one of the authors - John Doak - but I wouldn't provide a review if I didn't believe in the fundamentals of what he and David Justice provide in this tome. While there will be many perspectives of what being a DevOps role entails - and which languages you could leverage - the fact is GO is largely defacto 'go to' and John has been a promoter/evangelizer for well over 10 years at this point. Many of the anecdotal stories are true, some watered down but the premise and deliverable in each chapter builds out a tool chest that any size org can take advantage of - now GO and get yourself a copy of this book and put yourself into gear.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
R. Rose Jul 24, 2022
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I bought this book based on an initial read of the overview. Despite being quite a long book, I managed to read it over a couple of days.To summarise this is an excellent overview of how to build tooling with the Go Language. It covers a wide range of problem areas which should be familiar to anyone working in DevOps.Of specific merit is the chapter on moving from bash to Go as a scripting runner. Loved the detail of how to check the command environment to ensure it contains the necessary components. Also covers handling different data formats (e.g. csv, json and yaml) - which is actually super useful if you need to work between various systems.Later in the book - there is some coverage of how to use tools like Hashicorp Packer (generate a custom image) and Terraform (build a provider). The book also covers examples on Cloud Providers; AWS and Azure - it didn't take too much effort to use Google Cloud to be fair.If you have an interest in Go and need to build tooling to help in a variety of scenarios, this book is a great start on that journey.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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