Golang for Devops

Introduction

In the world of IT and software deployment, the term "DevOps" has become quite popular. DevOps is a combination of the words developers(Devs) and operations(Ops). The DevOps movement started around 2007-2009, with the purpose of bringing new development models to increase the speed and reduce the cost of software development through collaboration and the addition of more tools. Golang is a programming language that Google publicly launched in 2009. You must be wondering why it is used to create DevOps tools and why it is the most popular language for making DevOps tools or Cloud Infrastructure. The answer is, programmers want languages that are simple to understand and fast to learn and use. Because of Faster execution, scalability, effective garbage collection, concurrency & active developer community golang happens to solve most problems DevOps professionals face. Additionally, the majority of issues faced by DevOps professionals are resolved by golang and growing with golang has become a go-to language if building a DevOps or Cloud Native tool.

Golang Tools for DevOps

Golang is built with concurrency and with many other features which are not available in different languages. Whereas in Python additional libraries are needed to implement concurrency. With the rise of DevOps and in need for new tools people started using golang because it used to give better support and was easy to use and read for programmers. Hence programmers/product companies started moving towards golang. Some of the famous DevOps tools are made using golang for eg. Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform etc.

• Docker: Docker is a containerization platform. It helps users to containerize the application with packages and run inside the containers. It simplifies the process and helps deploy the app faster while also making it independent of platform environments. It uses many golang features, such as concurrency and garbage collection to achieve efficiency and high performance. Using golang also makes it easier to deploy over a production environment.
• Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that helps to manage, deploy and scale container applications. It helps to manage complex containerized environments and to automate many tasks involved in deploying, scaling applications and managing containers like load balancing, networking etc. Kubernetes is written in golang and uses concurrency to manage and coordinate multiple clusters and nodes running. It gives you a desired state using a declarative way to manage complex environments.
• Terraform: Terraform is an open source Infrastructure as a Code tool used to write IaC files to create efficient and robust infrastructures. Terraform is developed with golang and has features like concurrency and garbage collection, which aid infrastructure deployment. Using Terraform with golang speeds up and simplifies infrastructure setup.
• Ansible: Ansible is an open-source automation tool used to automate processes like setting up servers, distributing software, and configuring applications. Ansible modules are frequently written in the language Golang.
• Prometheus and Grafana: A time series database and open-source monitoring system are both called Prometheus. Prometheus exporters and alarms are frequently written in the popular language Golang. Data from Prometheus and other monitoring systems may be visualised using the free and open-source programme Grafana. Grafana plugins are frequently written in the language Golang.

As we saw golang was primarily designed to be an efficient language, with similarity to the C programming Language it made it easier to adapt in the industry and widely used to learn and use. Some key features of golang are

• Simple and easy-to-learn syntax: It has a simple and easy-to-learn syntax which makes it easier for developers to understand and write better code.
• Fast and efficient: Golang is known for its fast high performance and efficiency and because it uses a garbage collector developers do not have to worry about memory allocation or deallocation.
• Concurrency Support: Golang provides built-in concurrency support which easily handles multiple tasks simultaneously. It is necessary if the application deals with a large amount of data.
• Static typing: Golang is a statically typed language. Meaning variables and functions are known at the compiled time. eg. C or C++.
• Compiled Language: Golang is a compiled language, which means that before being executed, the code is converted into machine code. As a result, startup times are shorter and execution is more effective because the requirement for an interpreter is eliminated.

Like this Golang provides many other useful features which include Cross-platform compatibility, memory safety, standard library etc which makes it an ideal choice for creating robust and scalable applications. for eg. Prometheus is used for monitoring and alerting, Etcd is a distributed key-value store, CockroachDB is a scalable and distributed SQL database, Consul is a service mesh and many others tools are made using Golang.

Benefits of Golang for DevOps

Using golang can benefit in many ways in DevOps because of the various features that it provides but some of the few key advantages of using golang for DevOps are

1. Performance: Golang is well-known for its high performance, efficiency, and stability, which makes it ideal for developing DevOps tools that can handle large amounts of data and complex operations quickly. Golang can be significantly faster than other scripting languages such as Ruby or Python.
2. Simple syntax: Golang has a simple syntax that makes it simple to use and learn for a beginner.
3. Scalability: When the process loads, data volume or user demand increases but our application performs without compromising its performance or availability we call it a Scalable application. The main reason for making golang was to build robust infrastructure and scalable applications which can handle the load without compromising performance because of that golang is now widely used by many companies to create products.

Here's a quick differentiation between Golang, Python and Ruby

IV. Golang Use Cases in DevOps

Some more examples of How Golang is used in DevOps

1. Building Infrastructure Tools: Golang is an excellent language for building infrastructure tools. For example, Terraform and Packer are made using golang. Terraform has been widely used in the industry for Infrastructure as Code and Packerfor machine images for deployment across different environments. Because of different golang's features like concurrency and Ease to use makes it well-suited for these type of tools
2. Monitoring and Logging: Golang has emerged as a popular language to use for making Monitoring and Logging tools because of its high concurrency and scalability features. Using Golang makes it easier to handle large amounts of data and scale at the same time. This has led to the creation of a wide range of monitoring and logging tools, including popular ones like InfluxDB and Grafana.InfluxDb is a high-performance time series database that is designed to store large amounts of time-stamped data, such as system metrics, application logs etc. Whereas Grafana, on the other hand, is a popular open-source visualization tool that is used to create dashboards and visualize data, including InfluxDB. It is also built using Golang and provides features for data exploration, alerting, and collaboration.
3. Automation Scripts: Golang is also used to automate various DevOps tasks. Kubernetes operator or Helm is also made using golang. Kubernetes Operator is used to manage the deployment of applications and Helm is used to manage packages and the lifecycle of Kubernetes applications.
4. Cloud Infrastructure: In the current market, Golang is the most preferred language for making a cloud infrastructure because of tools such as CloudFoundry and OpenStack. These tools are used to manage cloud resources providing more scalable and secure infrastructure.

Overall, Golang is used extensively in DevOps to build a wide range of tools and applications. Its performance, concurrency, and ease of use make it well-suited for building infrastructure tools, monitoring and logging tools, automation scripts, containerization tools, and cloud infrastructure tools.

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