Development Operations & Site Reliability Engineering

Overview

Go helps enterprises automate and scale

Development Operations (DevOps) teams help engineering organizations automate tasks and improve their continuous integration and continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) process. DevOps can topple developmental silos and implement tooling and automation to enhance software development, deployment, and support.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) was born at Google to make the company’s “large-scale sites more reliable, efficient, and scalable,” writes Silvia Fressard, an independent DevOps consultant. “And the practices they developed responded so well to Google’s needs that other big tech companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, also adopted them.” SRE requires a mix of development and operations skills, and “empowers software developers to own the ongoing daily operation of their applications in production.”

Go serves both siblings, DevOps and SRE, from its fast build times and lean syntax to its security and reliability support. Go’s concurrency and networking features also make it ideal for tools that manage cloud deployment—readily supporting automation while scaling for speed and code maintainability as development infrastructure grows over time.

DevOps/SRE teams write software ranging from small scripts, to command-line interfaces (CLI), to complex automation and services, and Go’s feature set has benefits for every situation.

Key Benefits

Easily build small scripts with Go’s robust standard library and static typing

Go’s fast build and startup times. Go’s extensive standard library—including packages for common needs like HTTP, file I/O, time, regular expressions, exec, and JSON/CSV formats—lets DevOps/SREs get right into their business logic. Plus, Go’s static type system and explicit error handling make even small scripts more robust.

Quickly deploy CLIs with Go’s fast build times

Every site reliability engineer has written “one-time use” scripts that turned into CLIs used by dozens of other engineers every day. And small deployment automation scripts turn into rollout management services. With Go, DevOps/SREs are in a great position to be successful when software scope inevitably creeps. Starting with Go puts you in a great position to be successful when that happens.

Scale and maintain larger applications with Go’s low memory footprint and doc generator

Go’s garbage collector means DevOps/SRE teams don’t have to worry about memory management. And Go’s automatic documentation generator (godoc) makes code self-documenting–lowering maintenance overhead and establishing best practices from the get-go.

Featured users

Customer	Brief introduction	Projects using go
	Docker is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, written in Go, that DevOps/SRE teams leverage to “drive secure automation and deployment at massive scale,” supporting their CI/CD efforts.	Docker CI/CD
	Drone is a Continuous Delivery system built on container technology, written in Go, that uses a simple YAML configuration file, a superset of docker-compose, to define and execute Pipelines inside Docker containers.	Drone
	etcd is a strongly consistent, distributed key-value store that provides a reliable way to store data that needs to be accessed by a distributed system or cluster of machines, and it's written in Go.	etcd

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Go books on DevOps & SRE

• Go Programming for Network Operations
• Go Programming Blueprints
• Go in Action
• The Go Programming Language