5 programming languages you need to know for DevOps

Source – jaxenter.com

How can we make sure our DevOps adoption is a success? Are there certain languages that fit DevOps better than others? Today, we take a look at different programming languages to see which is the best approach for DevOps.

Quick caveat: if your favorite programming language isn’t on this list, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the bee’s knees. DevOps is a state of mind and a methodological process for technology, not an ironclad one-size-fits-all tech approach. If you’re rocking the DevOps mindset and coding in FORTRAN, you go on with your bad self.

Let’s dig right in! In no particular order:

1. JavaScript
The internet already runs on JavaScript. (Well, JavaScript and HTML.) Many of the most popular frameworks and libraries are written in JavaScript, from Angular to React and Node. Sever-side implementations aren’t the only thing this language has to offer: the massive community of developers means that there’s always help available on GitHub or Stack Overflow. JavaScript is a safe bet for developers.

However, although JavaScript is a little complicated for DevOps (all those libraries, all those dependencies), that doesn’t mean they don’t work well together. After all, what would DevOps be without Node, npm, or Angular? I don’t even want to think about it.

2. Go
Ah, Golang. Google’s open source programming language is more or less made for DevOps. Go was built for speed, but its emphasis on lean, network-efficient runtimes means great things for DevOps. It’s way less verbose than Java, and built on a foundation of C without any of the drawbacks.

Docker, the king of containers, is written in Go. And one reason why all sorts of DevOps tools are written in Go is because it makes it easy to compile standalone, static binaries for all major operating systems. No libraries, no dependencies, nothing.

3. Python
Python is on the way up as an all-purpose language. GitHub recently crowned it as their second-most popular programming language. Stack Overflow called it the fastest-growing major programming language. And it’s even considered the most popular language for machine learning. Python is basically all that and a bag of potato chips.

So, what can Python do for DevOps? Python easily reduces maintenance problems with monitoring and deployment tools like Ansible, salt, and more. Options like OpenStack give developers the resources to create private and public cloud infrastructure.

+1  Rust
Keep your eyes on Rust, which is poised to become the next big infrastructure language. Many Ruby fans have decamped over to Rust, in part because of the extremely well-documented Rust for Rubyists tutorial. (Documentation matters a lot! Incomplete documentation is the biggest problem encountered in open source.) Rust’s fast adoption of high documentation standards lowered the barrier to entry for everyone, making it easier for new fans to make the switch.

In DevOps, Rust has a growing role in systems automation, container management and container orchestration. Rust is being used in conjunction with Docker on a couple of projects, notably the online education platform Coursera. Oracle’s first container program was written in Rust. Clearly, Rust may be the technology to watch in 2018.