Golang for DevOps: A Practical Roadmap with Hands-on Tasks

Want to learn Golang for DevOps? Follow this roadmap with hands-on tasks and real-world automation examples to level up your skills.

Overview

This roadmap is designed to help DevOps engineers learn Golang while building practical tools for cloud operations, automation, and Kubernetes.

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Note

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Week 1: Golang Basics

Goal: Get comfortable with Go syntax and key features.

• ✅ Install Go and set up your environment
• ✅ Learn Go's basic syntax: variables, loops, conditionals
• ✅ Understand functions, methods, and structs
• ✅ Learn error handling in Go
• ✅ Work with arrays, slices, and maps
• ✅ Explore Goroutines (for concurrency)

Practice Project:

• Build a CLI tool that pings services/endpoints and reports their status (net/http package).

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Week 2: File Handling & Configurations

Goal: Read/write files, process YAML/JSON, and handle configurations.

• ✅ Learn file I/O in Go (os, io, bufio packages)
• ✅ Work with JSON and YAML parsing (encoding/json, gopkg.in/yaml.v3)
• ✅ Read environment variables (os.Getenv)
• ✅ Learn how to create and use configuration files

Practice Project:

• Create a utility that reads and validates YAML/JSON configuration files before deployment.

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Week 3: Networking & HTTP

Goal: Build command-line tools for cloud and Kubernetes-related operations.

• ✅ Understand the net/http package for making API calls
• ✅ Work with REST APIs using http.Client
• ✅ Learn HTTP server basics with net/http
• ✅ Explore Go’s built-in templating system

Practice Projects:

• Develop a simplified command-line tool that performs common cloud operations.
• Create an API that exposes system metrics like CPU, memory, and disk usage.

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Week 4: Concurrency & Scheduling

Goal: Learn how to handle multiple tasks efficiently.

• ✅ Learn Goroutines and Channels
• ✅ Work with the sync package
• ✅ Learn how to create a job scheduler using time.Ticker and cron packages
• ✅ Handle concurrent requests and workers

Practice Project:

• Develop a simple scheduler that runs tasks at specified intervals.

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Week 5: Kubernetes Development Basics

Goal: Work with Kubernetes API in Go.

• ✅ Learn how to interact with Kubernetes API using client-go
• ✅ Understand CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions)
• ✅ Explore controllers, webhooks, and operators

Practice Projects:

• Create a simple operator that manages a custom resource.
• Build a webhook that validates or mutates Kubernetes resources before they're created or updated.

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Week 6: Advanced Kubernetes Tools

Goal: Automate security and RBAC-related tasks.

• ✅ Learn how to create Kubernetes controllers
• ✅ Work with RBAC policies in Kubernetes
• ✅ Implement logging and monitoring features in Go

Practice Projects:

• Develop a controller that watches specific resources and takes actions when they change.
• Create a CLI tool that analyzes and visualizes RBAC permissions across your cluster.
• Build a CLI that validates security contexts on pods and containers.

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Week 7: System Utilities & Performance Testing

Goal: Build tools to analyze and optimize systems.

• ✅ Learn how to read system resource usage (syscall, os/exec)
• ✅ Work with Go profiling and benchmarking (pprof)
• ✅ Learn about log parsing and regex (regexp package)

Practice Projects:

• Develop a utility that synchronizes files between directories or systems.
• Build a tool that generates traffic to test application performance.
• Create a program that parses log files and extracts useful information.

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Week 8: Final Project & Best Practices

Goal: Bring everything together and follow Go best practices.

• ✅ Learn best practices for writing idiomatic Go code
• ✅ Understand Go modules and dependency management
• ✅ Explore testing in Go (testing package)
• ✅ Write a complete Go project with proper documentation

Final Project:

• Pick one or more of the projects above and refine them into production-ready tools.

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Next Steps

• Contribute to open-source Golang projects in DevOps
• Explore Go frameworks like Cobra (for CLI tools) and Fiber (for web APIs)
• Learn how to package and distribute Go applications

📌 Happy Coding! 🚀