How Go Is Effective For Sysadmins

May 14th, 2014 11:28am by Alex Williams

Editor’s Note: A look at Go from a toolsmithing perspective. — AW

There are a few things I need to get done. A primary task is to write a profile about Go, the Google led programming language. Well, why not in the meantime narrate what I am seeing pop up in my Twitter feed about Go and post it here? That’s what I am going to do and hopefully it will lead to a longer, more in-depth post about Go and what I learned at the most excellent Gophercon, the first ever Go conference.

I kept looking for examples of the relveance of Go at the conference but the flow of great material keeps coming with all the speaker talks that are getting posted. One of the latest is from New Relic’s Kelsey Hightower (a fellow Portlander!), who discused the advantages of Go for systems administrators. His talk is about Go from a toolsmithing point of view and deploying applications. It’s a fresh and oiccasionally humorous story about how he learned Go and CoreOs, the new Linux distribution for massive server deployments.

Overview of what he said as pulled from the blog post:

How Hightower leveraged the Go standard library for everyday system administration tasks
The way practical use of goroutines and channels is used in system utilities and scripts
Best practices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41GffiXhN6I

Watch the video — it’s worth the 23 minutes.

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the...