Using Go for DevOps - Book Review
I have a confession to make - when I was first asked to write a review for Go for DevOps - I originally thought this was just a book about DevOps - as in ‘Yay! Lets go do some DevOps!’
Actually, this book is about how to automate DevOps tasks using Go - as in the Go Programming Language!
My next confession is that I hadn’t researched Go before, having stuck to C#, Javascript, PowerShell, bash etc.
So with that in mind, I started reading the book and was pleasantly suprised at how easy it was to read, and how it gradually teaches you the basics of Go, followed by more advanced principles and finally how to apply those principles to DevOps automation.
In fact, if I was to use one word to sum the book up, it would be ‘Comprehensive’!
As mentioned, although I am a developer, I’d never tried to use Go before. Go for DevOps assumes no upfront knowledge (although, as with all books like this, and general understanding of programming basics).
The early chapters explain what Go is, how to setup a development environment and how to write your first lines of code - slowly building up to more advanced scenarios at a comfortable pace.
Then we start to delve into real world applications - particularly for managing Cloud environments. It looks at how to interact with monitoring and telemetry, building your own command line tools, automating workflows and even a bit on Terraform and how we can use it with Go during deployments.
Overall, I found Go for DevOps and easy read that slowly built up my skill level and showed me real world examples of how to use Go in the context of automating the management and deployment of Cloud resources.