Go Language for Ops and Site Reliability Engineering

Gustavo Franco
Site Reliability Engineer, Google
http://developers.google.com

* Operations vs Site Reliability Engineering

Operations

- Interrupt driven
- Repetitive
- Hard to scale

Site Reliability Engineering

- Project oriented
- Values automation
- Focus on scale

* Go Programming Language

"Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple,
reliable, and efficient software." -- golang.org

* Hello OSCON

.play go-sreops/hello.go

  $ go run hello.go -help
  Usage of /tmp/go-build212699297/command-line-arguments/_obj/a.out:
    -message="Hello, OSCON!": what to say
  exit status 2

* Programming for SRE and Ops - State of the Union

- "I will just write a small throw away script for that"

- "I don't want to learn a new language"

- "Language X is awesome and solves everything"

* Programming for SRE and Ops - Where do we go?

- One liners are here to stay

- Throw away scripts too so let's make them better

- Think of languages you can read as a toolkit

- Get very good at writing in just a few of them

* Agenda

- Why Go for Ops and SRE?

- Go features

- Go in production at Google

- Go in production outside Google

- Q&A

* Why Go for Ops and SRE? Simple, reliable and efficient

- Open Source

- One binary to rule them all

- No need for a Makefile, import defined dependencies

- Very fast compilation

* Why Go for Ops and SRE? Simple, reliable and efficient

- Garbage collection

- Readability is easy to achieve via gofmt

- RE2 regular expressions

- Testing, benchmarking and profiling built-in

* Why Go for Ops and SRE? Standard library examples

.link /pkg/fmt fmt

.link /pkg/io/ioutil io/ioutil

.link /pkg/net/http net/http

.link /pkg/os/exec os/exec

.link /pkg/path/filepath path/filepath

.link /pkg/regexp regexp

.link /pkg/strings strings

.link /pkg/text/tabwriter text/tabwriter

.link /pkg/time time

[[https://pkg.go.dev/][pkg.go.dev]] to your needs beyond the standard library

* Why Go for Ops and SRE? Concurrency via Goroutines

.play go-sreops/goroutines.go

* Why Go for Ops and SRE? Concurrency and Channels

.play go-sreops/goroutines-channels.go /START/,/STOP/

* Go features

- Hashes or dicts? Maps

- Arrays? Yes, but you will probably want to use Slices instead

- Modules are called Packages

- Structs

- Methods

- Pointers without arithmetic operations

Go grows with you - see interfaces and reflection

* Go in production at Google

dl.google.com - OSCON talk by Brad Fitzpatrick Friday, 10:00am

.link http://code.google.com/p/vitess Vitess

 vtocc: front-end to MySQL that improves scalability

.link http://code.google.com/p/emtail Emtail

 Whitebox monitoring data from logs to a timeseries database

.link http://code.google.com/p/go-commander Go Commander

 Command line library for Go

Machine lifecycle management

via App Engine

* Go in production outside Google

.link http://labix.org/pipe Pipe

 Unix-like pipelines for Go

.link http://www.gocircuit.org Gocircuit

 Inter host Goroutines

.link http://juju.ubuntu.com Juju

 Service orchestration management tool

.link http://www.docker.io Docker

 Containers management tool

.link http://www.packer.io Packer

 Tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms

* Q&A

 Take the tour - [[tour.golang.org]]