Software is increasingly used in many critical areas, it is now more important to make sure that it is reliable and also produced at a fast pace. Traditional development methodologies and infrastructure management processes are not quite equipped with handling such a huge responsibility. 

There have been many development models that aim to provide high quality and improving services and applications at a fast pace. DevOps is an important one of them which is an aggregation of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools. However, to efficiently implement the methodology it is better to have knowledge in certain programming & scripting languages.

In this article, we explain how Golang development is suitable for developing applications within the DevOps methodology. But before going into that, let us see a brief overview of how DevOps works so that we can establish the ground of what a language needs to have to support it.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps is a combination of two words — Development and Operations. In DevOps, both the processes of Software Development and operations engineers are tightly integrated and work together in the whole Software development lifecycle, from design to implementation through product support.

While implementing DevOps, you would certainly come across various aspects of it. Some of them are:

DevOps values: these are the fundamental values that determine the essence of all of DevOps principles. They are most close to the agile manifesto and its principles.

DevOps practices: These are the practices that will allow their principles to be applied. They include continuous integration of different processes and continuous deployment of the software and many others. 

DevOps tools: these are the tools that help implementation directly or ease the process of implementation. They include containerization and deployment applications and many others.

DevOps provides speed, Reliability, Rapid Delivery, Scale, and Security in the processes it has been applied over.

For a  programming language to be used in DevOps must be easy to develop, efficient in resource usage, continuously integrable, and easily deployable.

Let us now see how Go is useful for DevOps:

Golang for DevOps

The development of Golang was started in the times when multi-core CPUs are much available and the importance of concurrency is well understood, so, there is no wonder the designers of it would take into account those things.

Go supports all the needed operations of DevOps. Also being a decade into the world, many people have produced a number of powerful tools and Libraries. Some of the Salient features of Go are:

  • Simplicity: Go is designed to be extremely simple to develop programs with. This not only makes development easy but also highly readable.
  • Concurrency: Go’s concurrency supports the development of highly scalable applications which are very much required in this age.
  • Performance: Go is a compiled language, which makes programs written in go to be extremely fast.
  • Portability: Go can run on different platforms and architectures 
  • Tools & Libraries: Go has a powerful standard library and lots of other tools that support operations in various domains.

The importance and power of Go have been recognized by many organizations around the world and they have started implementing in their own systems. Moreover, some of the DevOps tools themselves like Kubernetes, Docker, and many others are written or have been re-written in Go!