How to Leverage Go for Your Networking Needs

Video

About the Talk

This session highlights Sneha Inguva’s networking journey through Go. She discusses the useful packages, key learnings, and struggles faced while building a variety of networking services within and outside of DigitalOcean. Walk away with a clear understanding of how to specifically leverage Go for your own networking needs.

What You’ll Learn

• How to leverage Go’s net package and several open-source packages to build common networking primitives such as load balancers, port scanners, and DHCP servers
• Go’s packages for leveraging various connections (Unix sockets, raw sockets, and packet sockets) to send packets or frames
• Networking protocols used by the aforementioned services
• Concurrency benefits of Go and struggles of testing networking services

Resources

• Slides

Sneha’s Networking Journey Through Go

“My foray into Go began a few years ago when I started working at DigitalOcean. While building an abstraction layer on top of Kubernetes and familiarizing myself with the language, I began to love it. Syntactically simple, with amazing concurrency primitives and a wonderful community, Go was an excellent choice for a cloud-hosting company with a variety of low-level, server-side microservices.

Two year ago, however, I joined the software-defined networking team and learned of another application of Go; networking services. The networking team at DigitalOcean uses Go for a variety of purposes — from DHCP servers to IP address management services, to even wrappers around virtual switch tooling. Intrigued, I decided to also investigate how Go could be used to build other services such as port scanners and load-balancers.

This session highlights my networking journey via Go. I discuss useful packages, key learnings, and even struggles faced while building a variety of networking services within and outside of DigitalOcean. I discuss both relevant packages within the standard library and open-source packages used to implement key network protocols. Through this talk, I hope you gain an understanding of how to specifically leverage Go for your own networking needs.”

About the Presenter

Sneha Inguva is a Software Engineer on the networking team at DigitalOcean. She enjoys building cloud products by day and debugging ominous context-cancelled errors by night. Interestingly, her journey through this fantastical field has taken her from casino gaming to 3D printing startups. In her spare time, she professionally lounges about with her cat while WFH.