Familiarity with OpenStack is likely to continue to be one of the most in-demand job skills in the new year, both for developers and system administrators. But OpenStack is a huge area, encompassing dozens of individual projects with varying degrees of complexity. Building and keeping up your skills can be a challenge.

Fortunately, there are lots of resources out there to help you learn what you need to know. In addition to the official documentation, numerous training and certification programs, books, and other resources, there are also plenty of community-created tutorials, guides, and how-tos out there created by OpenStack developers and users who wish to share their first-hand knowledge.

To help you keep up with the wealth of community-driven content, every month Opensource.com rounds up a collection of recently-published OpenStack tips and guides that we think you might enjoy. So without further ado, let's dive in.

First up this month, we have a guide on how to install and run Tempest. Tempest is a testing tool which allows you to run integration tests against your OpenStack cluster. Learn how to grab the Tempest source, configure it, and run tests against your custom environment.

Do you work with TripleO for deploying OpenStack or provisioning new resources for your cloud? Then don't miss this TripleO cheat sheet which will take you through several common scenarios.

Once you've got OpenStack up and running, a large portion of any admin's time is going to be spent monitoring their cloud to make sure that everything is running properly, loads are well-balanced, and that if problems do occur, that they are easy to track down. In this guide to monitoring an OpenStack deployment with Prometheus and Grafana, learn how to get some basic monitoring tools up and running.

There are numerous options for orchestrating various components of your cloud infrastructure to launch services using automated help. Within OpenStack, the native approach is the Heat project. Understand the basics of Heat and how it works with this quick introduction.

Keystone, the authentication service within OpenStack that helps to manage identities within your cloud, is changing token formats. If you've used OpenStack previously with UUID tokens, here's what you need to know about the new Fernet token format before you upgrade.

Finally this month, let's take a look at a couple of helpful guides for OpenStack networking topics. The IPv4 address space is essentially full, and so if you're not in the process of upgrading your infrastructure to support IPv6, now is the time to start thinking about it. Take a look at this guide to deploying IPv6-only tenants with OpenStack to get a glimpse at the post-IPv4 world, as well as this guide to IPv6 provider networks.

That's it for this month. For more helpful OpenStack guides, check out our complete collection of community-authored OpenStack tutorials, which will connect you with hundreds of other guides authored over the past few years.