The good of Go for SREs

If you are an SRE, Go must be one of the languages you should know for sure. There are multiple ways you can use Go in your day to day.

In this repository you will find few reasons why Go is one of the best languages you must master as an SRE

CLI tools

Standard Library

In Go is simple to create you own CLI tool.

Using the standard library you can create a basic CLI EXAMPLE

cd simple-cli
go build .
./simple-cli --name carlos

Cobra

https://github.com/spf13/cobra

Using Cobra you can create complex command line tools with many features already build in

Cobra is used in helm, hugo, gh

With Cobra you get these features out of the box:

• Help output
• Autocompletion for zsh or fish
• command suggestion "Do you mean this?"
• Command flags
• Multi platform binaries

Why not use bash scripts, it's not intuitive, personally I always struggle reading bash files, there is no standard way to code it, there is no intellisense, there is no easy way to test them.
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/4b1f9201181340099b698246857ea98d/using-go-instead-of-bash-for-scripts.html

EXAMPLE

cd cobra-cli
go build .
./cobra-cli echo -t=4 carlos

File Templating

Go Standard File Templates

Go has a powerfull templating engine EXAMPLE

HELM Templates

This template engine has been used by other tools likehelm
HELM takes full advantage of the Go template engine
https://www.practical-go-lessons.com/chap-32-templates
https://helm.sh/docs/chart_template_guide/named_templates

EXAMPLE

helm template --dry-run ./mychart/

Web server

Go is one of the languages where creating an standalone web server is simple and secure. EXAMPLE

Infrastructure as Code

With Go you can create you own infrastructure using Pulumi

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-plugin-go
https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-exec
https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cdktf/api-reference/go

unittest infrastructure as code

You can test you Terraform plans using Go with Terratest

Honorable mentions

https://docs.dagger.io/manuals/developer/go

References

https://roadmap.sh/golang
https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go