Programming Networks and Automation with Go

Most networks rarely fail all at once. I mean, they drift, one undocumented cable and one hand-typed change at a time, until nobody can say for certain what is running. This book shows programmers how to use Go to check, modify, monitor and protect an enterprise infrastructure with just code. In this book, you get to work in a free Containerlab with Nokia SR Linux and FRR, building netkit, along with a single Go toolkit.

The book explores various genuine problems, like an optics recall, a partner VPN that's not working right, or a backup that's slow because of traffic, and ends with a command that solves it. I'll show you to use LLDP to discover topology, manage devices over SSH with scrapligo and read YANG-modeled state through NETCONF, RESTCONF and gNMI. You'll be handling multi-vendor configurations from validated intent and rolling out changes with dry runs, confirmed commits, canaries and automatic rollback. And you'll stream telemetry into Prometheus, capture packets with gopacket, peer with routers using GoBGP and heal routine failures within guardrails. Additionally, you'll be auditing security policies, extending automation to AWS and Kubernetes, and shipping everything as a tested CLI with a CI pipeline.

Key Learnings

Explore real topology with LLDP and compare it automatically with network diagrams.

Manage multi-vendor devices with scrapligo, strict host keys and bounded concurrency.

Read YANG-modeled state through NETCONF, RESTCONF and gNMI.

Plan subnets and claim addresses atomically through NetBox API.

Render multi-vendor configurations from using ygot and Go templates.

Make changes using dry runs, diffs, confirmed commits and Git change records.

Roll out fleet changes using canaries and errgroup waves with targeted automatic rollback.

Stream gNMI telemetry and syslog events into Prometheus and Grafana to expose bursts.

Repair routine failures automatically within guardrails, hold files and human escalation.

Ship audited, tested automation as a Cobra CLI and HTTP API gated by CI.

Table of Content

Mapping Hidden Network Dependencies

Automating Concurrent SSH Queries

Automating IP Address Management

Querying YANG Models

Writing Intent Instead of Commands

Deploying Reversible Config Changes

Orchestrating Hundreds of Devices

Streaming Real-Time Network Telemetry

Troubleshooting Packet-Level Faults

Auto-healing Routine Failures

Guarding Network with Code

Automating Hybrid Cloud Networking

Shipping Automation Tools