A new release, Mitaka, brings new features to the various projects that make up OpenStack. And while it’s exciting to take advantage of a six month release cycle to gain new features and fix issues, the rapid pace of development can make OpenStack difficult to keep up with, even for seasoned cloud professionals. Fortunately, there are many great learning resources out there, from books to training to official documentation, and of course, many community-created articles and blog posts as well.

Every month, Opensource.com takes a trip around the OpenStack community to find the best in newly created tips, tutorials, guides, how-tos, and other great OpenStack resources to help you master the open source cloud. Here are some of our favorites.

• First up, let’s take a look at a tutorial from Adam Young on getting started with Puppet for Keystone, OpenStack’s identity management project. Adam’s blog is a treasure trove of Keystone tips, tricks, and snippets, and a great place to learn about the intricate details of how OpenStack handles identity, policy, tokens, and more.
• Sometimes, the easiest ways to learn the quirks of a system are from trying it yourself, and other times, you can bypass a bit by learning from some else’s trials. Chandan Kumar offers up his lessons learned while packaging OpenStack’s test sub-packages as a part of the RDO project.
• When it comes to deploying applications in an OpenStack cloud, Heat is the native OpenStack orchestration service for getting your applications up and running. To get a sense of the power of Heat, take a look at some of the example templates offered by Cloudwatt as a part of their five minute stacks series, which last month included pfSense, an open source firewall and router tool, and combining ClamAV and SpamAssassin for spam protection on a RainLoop webmail server.
• Versioned objects are coming to many OpenStack projects, to make upgrades easier. Not sure exactly what they are or how they work? Gorka Eguileor walks you through versioned objects in Oslo.
• OpenStack developers may often find themselves directly querying an API endpoint with curl to test various things, which unfortunately, leads to several drawbacks: needing to know the endpoint locations, manually refreshing tokens, plus needing to remember the intricacies of the curl commands to execute. Jamie Lennox offers os-http as a simpler alternative and in this blog post explains what it is and how it works.
• TripleO is typically used to deploy new cloud environments. But what if your servers are already deployed and provisioned? TripleO might still be useful tool, for example, to use virtual infrastructure for testing purposes or to run other provisioning systems, according to James Slagle who walks you through his attempt to set up TripleO with deployed servers.

Finally this month, Ronald Bradford offers a trio of posts on working with Devstack, an OpenStack distribution designed specifically for development and testing. Bradford takes you through the basics of downloading and installing Devstack, dealing with issues for people on machines without much memory (which these days, is anything under around 8 GB), and finally, what to do when Devstack is up and running to begin poking around.

That wraps us up for this month, but be sure to check out our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials for over two years worth of additional free online OpenStack learning resources. And if we missed a great new tutorial that you found helpful, be sure to let us know in the comments below.