Having OpenStack experience continues to be among the most in-demand skills in the tech world, as organizations continue to seek to build and manage their own open source clouds. But OpenStack is a big topic, made up of dozen of individual projects that are being actively developed at a rapid pace. Just keeping your skills up to date can be a challenge.

The good news is that there are lots of resources out there to keep you up to speed. In addition to the official project documentation, a variety training and certification programs, printed guides, and other resources, there are also a ton of tutorials and guides written by members of the OpenStack community and published across a variety of blogs and online publications.

At Opensource.com, every month we gather the best of these community-created resources and bring them together for you into one handy package. Here’s what we rounded up last month.

• OpenStack has a native orchestration tool, Heat, which can be used to roll out installations of your favorite software from premade templates, either at the command line or through the Horizon user interface. While you’ll probably want to build your own Heat templates to meet the exact needs of your applications and the specifics of your environment, one great way to get started with Heat is to look at example templates from others. These deployment samples for either a LAMP stack, or building that a little further, WordPress, might help you to build an application deployment template that meets your needs.

• Not everyone who wants to deploy their own cloud has access to bare metal servers, and certainly many lack access to secondary servers for testing. Maybe you want to run a test environment as a proof of concept or to check out new features before you upgrade, or want a place to play around safely without endangering your production environment. Learn how to deploy OpenStack on AWS in this tutorial, although be sure to understand the limitations that may be present before you do.

• Mistral, OpenStack’s workflow service, can be used to execute a series of tasks in your cloud environment. It’s an important component of TripleO, which uses OpenStack’s native services for deploying and upgrading OpenStack. Learn more about how MIstral works and how TripleO makes use of its capabilities in this short article.

• Finally, for anyone working on the upstream OpenStack project, here’s a handy tip that may help you better manage code. If you’ve ever needed to update several repositories with shared code snippets at the same time, which is a common need within OpenStack, this guide and script can help you out. 

That’s it for this time. In addition, you should be sure to check out our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials, which brings together hundreds of individual guides published across the past three years.