OpenStack is undoubtedly a skill in hot demand. Whether you're a seasoned IT pro looking to leverage cloud technology in your organization, or just starting out in your career and hoping to put some experience under your belt, we're here to help.

Every month, Opensource.com gathers together the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips into a single bundle to help you learn what you need to know. For much more information than we can include here, be sure to check out the official documentation for OpenStack for further explanations, guides, and other details you'll want to know.

Horizon, the OpenStack dashboard, sees frequent changes in its upstream repository as new features are added. Trying out these new revisions is simple, assuming you've got a test OpenStack installation up and running already. Matthias Runge provides this quick guide to testing Horizon snapshots with a few quick git commands.

Puppet is one of the most popular tools for deploying OpenStack in a prescriptive manner. Thinking of creating a Puppet module to help you with deploying in your environment? You won't want to miss this set of best practices from Emilien Macchi.

Once you've got OpenStack up and running, you'll want to make available a set of cloud images in your environment for your users to choose for their VMs. But what is the best way to create those images? Here's a short guide for RPM-based systems.

Do you write code for OpenStack? Do you write code for OpenStack in emacs? Then you're going to love this collection of tools for optimizing your code environment from Sean Dague. Sorry, vim users.

OpenStack depends on regular code reviews from its developers in order to get new submitted patches merged into the main code line. Code reviewers are always needed. Think code review is something you could provide, but wondering where to start? Steve Martinelli offers this checklist which should be helpful to reviewers old and new alike.

Not everyone who works with Linux on the server-side is running Linux on their local client. For those who are working with OpenStack from a Mac, here's a quick look at installing the OpenStack command line tools on OS X.

When it comes to OpenStack development, a huge amount of the planning, collaboration, and coordination happens on IRC. Great for its simplicity and its open nature, one drawback of IRC is that if you’re not in the room, you’re going to miss important conversations. One solution for dealing with this is using a ZNC ‘bouncer’ to keep track of what’s going on when you’re not there. But to access ZNC from multiple machines, you need a slightly more robust solution: ZNC on ZNC. Doug Hellman provides this great tutorial on deploying nested ZNC services with Ansible.

Looking to work with databases-as-a-service within OpenStack? Look no further than Trove. Trove makes database provisioning easy, but currently, building Trove-compatible images is not-so-easy. Victoria Martinez de la Cruz brings you what you need to know in this tutorial aimed at RDO.

That's it for this month. Check out our complete OpenStack tutorials collection for more great guides and hints. And if we missed your favorite new guide or resource, let us know in the comments!