6 new guides and how-tos for OpenStack

There's no cure for the constant onward march of technology, but there are some great ways for you to keep up with it.

If you're a developer or administrator of an OpenStack cloud, this is certainly the case. Learning new skills is made a little easier by the large number of resources available to help you. Along with the official project documentation, documentation and support from your distribution or vendor, printed books and other publications, and certification and training programs, there are many wonderful community-created resources as well.

Here are some of our favorite new guides, tips, and tutorials for OpenStack that we came across in the past month.

• Let's kick off this month with a non-technical article to start. Did you have a talk accepted at the OpenStack Summit next month in Sydney? Congratulations! But now what? Here's how to perfect your summit talk and make it a huge success.

• This isn't the first tutorial we've come across walking you through the steps of setting up a Kubernetes cluster on OpenStack, but it's a pretty straightforward one. Follow step-by-step instructions on using Magnum and Heat to get your cluster up and running.

• Next up, check out this two part guide to using Director, Red Hat's OpenStack deployment and lifecycle tool, to deploy co-located Ceph storage on the same devices where your OpenStack compute nodes are running. This hyperconverged infrastructure approach helps make it easier to efficiently use the full capacity of a deployment, and may make it easier to start and plan your OpenStack deployment as well.

• Horizon is the web-based GUI interface to your OpenStack cloud. While it's entirely possible to use OpenStack completely from the command line, deploying a GUI interface makes it much easier for non-experts to make use of your cloud's resources. Here's a new video guide to installing and configuring Horizon.

• Another great piece in the OpenStack Superuser online publication this month brings you answers to five of the most common OpenStack questions from new users. From figuring out what version you're running, to starting and stopping services from the command line, to configuring the firewall, this is a great guide for the user just getting started.

• OpenStack developers need to make sure that their software works in a variety of different configurations. While a number of tests are performed automatically by the OpenStack testing infrastructure, sometimes developers want to target a specific software configuration that's not available in the upstream continuous integration testing tools. One approach to setting up your own CI is Software Factory, and this guide walks you through setting it up.

If you'd like to learn more, take a look back at our entire collection of OpenStack guides, how-tos, and tutorials containing over three years of community-generated content. Did we leave out a great one? Let us know in the comments below, and we'll consider adding it in our next edition.