Cloud infrastructure is a hugely in-demand skill. And if you're looking for an open source solution for your cloud infrastructure needs, chances are OpenStack is in that mix.

OpenStack is a huge collection of projects, providing solutions and integrations for nearly every part of the cloud stack. While this large scope makes it a powerful tool, it also means that it can be hard to keep up and learn about the full suite of projects, how to use them, how to customize them, and how to contribute code back to them.

Fortunately, there are a lot of options to help you. In addition to the official project documentation, printed books, and certification and training programs, there are also a ton of great community-created resources. Every month here on Opensource.com, we take a look for recently published guides and tutorials across blogs and other websites, and bring them to you in one place. Let's dive into what we found this time around.

First up in this month's batch, we have a guide from Antony Messerli on how to set up an OpenStack cloud with Ansible. Messerli walks us through the configuration on his lab environment and the playbooks necessary to get OpenStack up and running on his cluster, as well as the basics of adding images, setting up the network, and more. It's a good read if you're considering Ansible to set up a small local OpenStack test environment.

Next, have you ever wondered how Neutron networking works in OpenStack? How does what's happening in the application correspond to the underlying code? Arie Bregman provides an OpenStack Neutron code deep dive in this post; you'll definitely want to be familiar with general networking principles and at least a little bit of the OpenStack code base in order to follow along.

Gerrit is the open source code review project used by OpenStack in order to manage incoming patches and allow for feedback and testing before merging changes into the main OpenStack code base. For those used to a different code review system (or none at all), Gerrit can be a little confusing to follow, though it has great dashboard features so you can see just the information that's important to you. Dougal Matthews walks us through his Gerrit dashboard setup in this article, which might just help you create your own.

The videos from last month's OpenStack Summit in Boston have become available, and whether you were able to attend last month's event or not, they contain a treasure trove of topics both technical and non-technical. Not sure where to start? How about this presentation from Julio Villarreal Pelegrino on how to plan for, build, and operate a successful OpenStack cloud at scale.

Security should be at the top of concerns for any cloud administrator. But where do you get started? Naveen Joy posted a great checklist of ten security questions for locking down your OpenStack network; you can check it out in addition to the video from his talk on the same topic last month.

The internal messaging services in OpenStack are managed in a common library that lives inside of the Oslo project called, not surprisingly, Oslo.Messenging. Learn the basics of what this library is and what it offers in this two part blog post.

Want more? Be sure to check out our complete set of OpenStack guides, howtos, and tutorials from over three years of community-generated content to help you learn to be an effective OpenStack developer or administrator.

Know of a great tutorial, guide, or how-to that we should have included? Share it in the comments below