Lessons in OpenStack: New tutorials and how-tos

If you're working in open source cloud infrastructure, there's a good chance that you're working with OpenStack.

And OpenStack is no small thing to learn about. Made up of dozens of related projects working together to power your cloud infrastructure needs, even those immersed in OpenStack every day need good resources for keeping up.

Fortunately, there are a lot of options to help you. There's the official project documentation, of course, as well as many choices for printed books, certification and training programs, and lots of great community-created resources. Here on Opensource.com, every month we take a look for recently published guides and tutorials across blogs and other websites, and bring them to you in one handy blog post. Let's take a look at this month's collection.

• First, let's take a look at an explainer piece from Artom Lifshitz on virtual device role tagging, a Nova feature which tells guest operating systems about how virtual network interfaces and disks are intended to be used. This guide explains how tagging works and how it can be consumed.

• Next, Loïc Dachary explains how to shrink an OpenStack image, which can help reduce the file system requirements for large disk images, especially those from VMs created on hypervisors which don't support tools like fstrim to trim space usage. It's a relatively straightforward process documented simply in this blog post.

• The OpenStack team at CERN has been using the Cinder block storage project in production for over three years now, helping to power over a petabyte of storage. In this retrospective, they provide some helpful tips, considerations, and other advice for those who are seeking to manage block storage at scale.

• Finally this month, let's take a look back at a great three part series from the Red Hat Stack blog on using Ansible validations with Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Ansible is a popular open source tool for admins in many different roles, and in this guide, you'll learn how to perform a number of validations based off of Ansible playbooks written for the upstream TripleO Validations project.

Interested in more like these? Then why not check out our complete set of OpenStack guides, howtos, and tutorials containing over three years of community-generated content on many different OpenStack-related topics.

And if you're aware of a great tutorial, guide, or how-to that we could share in our next update, be sure to let us know in the comments below.