Day 15: Essential Python Libraries for DevOps

Reading JSON and YAML in Python

As a DevOps Engineer, you should be able to parse files, be it Txt, JSON, YAML, etc.
You should know what libraries one should use in Python for DevOps.
Python has numerous libraries like os, sys, JSON, YAML etc. that a DevOps Engineer uses in day-to-day tasks.
JSON and YAML files define and provision infrastructure components programmatically and enable automated infrastructure management.
Configuration data in these files helps in managing deployments, release parameters and environment-specific settings.
These files contain pipeline definitions, allowing for configuration and modification of the CI/CD pipeline.

Hands-On Tasks

Create a Dictionary in Python and write it to a JSON File.

Steps:

import json

data = {
    "name": "John",
    "age": 30,
    "city": "New York"
}

file_name = "data.json"

with open(file_name, "w") as json_file:
    json.dump(data, json_file)

print(f"Data has been written to {file_name}")

We import the json module to work with JSON data.
Created the dictionary with the name data with some elements in it.
Specifies the name of the JSON file as file_name.
Use the open () function with mode w to write in a file.
Inside the block, use json.dump() to write the data dictionary to the JSON file.
In the end, we print the message to indicate the file written in JSON file.
1. Read the services.json file and print the service names of every cloud service provider.

services.json :

    {
        "services": {
          "debug": "on",
          "aws": {
            "name": "EC2",
            "type": "pay per hour",
            "instances": 500,
            "count": 500
          },
          "azure": {
            "name": "VM",
            "type": "pay per hour",
            "instances": 500,
            "count": 500
          },
          "gcp": {
            "name": "Compute Engine",
            "type": "pay per hour",
            "instances": 500,
            "count": 500
          }
        }
      }

Steps:

You can use Python to read JSON files and print the service names of cloud providers.

import json

with open('cloud_services.json', 'r') as json_file:
    data = json.load(json_file)

services = data.get('services', {})

for provider, service_info in services.items():
    if isinstance(service_info, dict) and 'name' in service_info:
        print(f"Service name for {provider}: {service_info['name']}")

Import the json module to work with JSON data.
json.load() is used to load the JSON data from the file.
Retrieve the services dictionary from the loaded JSON data.
cloud_services.json is the name of your JSON file.
Iterate through each service provider in the services dictionary and print the name of the service.
1. Read the services.yaml file using Python, and read the contents to convert YAML to JSON

services.yaml

    services:
      debug: 'on'
      aws:
        name: EC2
        type: pay per hour
        instances: 500
        count: 500
      azure:
        name: VM
        type: pay per hour
        instances: 500
        count: 500
      gcp:
        name: Compute Engine
        type: pay per hour
        instances: 500
        count: 500

To read a YAML file in Python and convert it to JSON, you can use the PyYAML library to handle the YAML file and json.dump() to convert it to a JSON file.

    import yaml
    import json

    with open('services.yaml', 'r') as yaml_file:
        yaml_data = yaml.safe_load(yaml_file)

    json_data = json.dumps(yaml_data, indent=2)

    print(json_data)

Use of yaml.safe_load() function to read the YAML file in the Python data.
Use json.dumps() function to convert the data into JSON data.
The indent=2 is just for pretty printing.
Finally, we print the JSON data.

Make sure that you have the PyYAML library installed. You can install it using a pip e.g. pip install pyyaml

< That is all for today. Tomorrow will be a new topic. FOLLOW to join me in the journey of DevOps>

Day 15: Essential Python Libraries for DevOps

Table of contents

Reading JSON and YAML in Python

Hands-On Tasks