With so much going on in OpenStack, the open source cloud computing project, it can be difficult to keep track of what's new and to learn how to use it. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there to help, including third-party training, listservs, IRC channels, and of course the official documentation.

There are also a great number of community-written tutorials, guides, and howtos for OpenStack that can be a helpful way to learn. Every month, Opensource.com collects the best in new community tutorials written in the prior month and brings them to you in one handy collection. Without further ado, here are some of our favorites from last month.

We're starting out our roundup this month with a great piece from Augustina Ragwitz on contributing her first OpenStack infrastructure patch. If you have never contributed code to an upstream OpenStack project before, this is a great overview of the steps involved. Wriiting the code itself is only a part of the battle, but the other steps really aren't that hard once you know what to do.

Next, let's take a look at just how easy it can be to deploy applications on top of OpenStack. New this month in CloudWatt's 5 Minute Stacks series are two more great application deployment examples: LDAP and Jenkins. With just a few little changes, you can mold these tutorials to your environment and deploy applications on your own cloud.

When it comes time to upgrade your OpenStack deployment, one option is to set up a new environment in parallel and migrate your data from one to the other. For this exercise, using a shared NFS storage volume might be the easiest way. Lars Kellogg-Stedman walks you through the steps of how to perform the migration.

For some types of applications, containers might prove to be an ideal application development and deploying tool. But containers aren't a complete replacement for traditional virtualization; most organizations would do well to explore both strategies. Fortunately, the choice isn't either/or. If you've explored Docker Machine, this tutorial for using Docker Machine with OpenStack might be right up your alley.

In order to contribute to any open source project, it helps to have a local copy of the software to use. In OpenStack, the preferred way to deploy locally is DevStack. One option for deploying DevStack locally is with Vagrant; here's how.

In our final tutorial this month, we take a look at cloud federation through Keystone, the OpenStack identity service. In order to use Keystone on one cloud deployment for authentication on another, a Keystone-to-Keystone federation will make cross-authentication possible. Here's how to use a playbook in Openstack-Ansible to set this up.

That's it for this time, but if you're still looking for me, be sure to check out our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials for more great learning resources. And if you've got suggestions for our next roundup, be sure to let us know in the comments below.