Practical tips for working with OpenStack

http://opensource.com/business/15/11/practical-tips-working-openstack

To build your own cloud and take advantage of the power of the open source powered OpenStack project takes dedicated resources and a good bit of learning. Due to the size of the project and the pace of development, keeping up can be difficult. The good news is that there are many resources to help, including the official documentation, a variety of OpenStack training and certification programs, as well as community-authored guides.
To help you keep up, Opensource.com puts together a list of the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips every month. Here are some of our top picks for the last month.

• First up, let's take a look at a piece from the CERN OpenStack cloud team on scheduling and disabling cells. Cells are a way of partitioning your cloud infrastructure into smaller pieces which can be controlled independently of one another. For large installations, they help make operating the cloud easier, but they also introduce some new restrictions. In this post, learn more about configuring and using cells.
• Next, if you've been thinking about ways to make your OpenStack network work with containers, you may be interested in checking out a project called Kuryr. Kuryr works with OpenStack's Neutron networking project to provide networking capabilities to Docker containers. By working with Open Virtual Network (OVN) as a plugin backend to Neutron, your containers can talk to each other on your virtual network. Here's a look at how to get all of the pieces in this setup integrated.
• If you've been wanting to learn how to use Ansible to manage parts of your OpenStack network, you'll be pleased to hear that several new Ansible modules specifically designed for working with OpenStack have recently been released. Learn about these new modules, what they do, and how to use them in this handy walk through.
• Ceph is one of the most popular open source storage solutions for using OpenStack, and a new patch to the upstream Nova project makes using Ceph for taking VM snapshots easier than ever. Take a look at the underlying architecture and see just how easy it is to enable on your cloud.
• With OpenStack's fast release cycle, being able to keep your workloads up and running through an upgrade is both critical and challenging. OpenStack's Nova has made huge strides at making live upgrades easier in recent years, and in many cases upgrades can be done without perceptible effects to end users. In this series of deep dives, learn how Nova handles live upgrades and what steps you needs to take with objects, RFC APIs, and database migrations to keep your applications up and running through an upgrade.

Itching to learn more? Check out our complete roundup of OpenStack tutorials for more great resources, including links to almost one hundred community-generated guides. Are we missing one of your favorites? Please let us know so we can consider it for our next collection.