OpenStack is a huge project with lots of constituent parts and fast development cycles. It can be hard to keep up and keep your mental toolkit fresh. We're here to help.

We compile the very best of recently published how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips into a handy collection every month. And don't forget, if you need help beyond what's offered in these tutorials, the official documentation for OpenStack is always a great place to look.

First up this month is, be sure to check out this simple guide to installing OpenStack Icehouse on CentOS in a two-node arrangement. While it might not be the most current OpenStack release, this guide is long and comprehensive, and well worth your time to check out if you're interested in doing something similar.

Next, if you've exploring Go and are interest in learning how to use Go to interface with OpenStack, the Linux Foundation has a great new piece which will get you started using the OpenStack SDK for Go.

It's the question on everybody's mind when it comes to cloud: Will it scale? If you're ready to branch out beyond the typical few nodes in some of the more basic tutorials, here's a look at scaling Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform up to 100 compute nodes on top of AWS using Ravello.

Gnocchi is the "Time Series Database as a Service" project for OpenStack; it's great for getting a better understanding of what's going on under the hood with cloud performance. But all of the data you're logging with Gnocchi needs to be stored somewhere. Here's a great look at how developers at eNovance wrote a Gnocchi storage driver for Ceph.

Integrating OpenStack with your organization's existing authentication system isn't always the most obvious thing. Here's a great new guide to take you through adding an LDAP backed domain to a Packstack install.

Next up, something a little bit less oriented at operators and more for developers, but still a good read for anybody who touches OpenStack. It's all about understanding the process. Here's a look at contributing to open cloud projects without losing your mind.

Horizon, the web dashboard interface for OpenStack, is a great way for users to interface with a cloud installation. But the vanilla installation is pretty basic. Chances are, you'll want to customize it in some way in order to provide more features for your users. Here's how to build custom dashboards in Horizon.

Our final featured tutorial this month is about getting OpenStack to work with your configuration management tool, and in this case taking a look at Chef. Take a look and get Chef intergrated with your OpenStack instances.

That wraps it up for this month. Be sure to check out our complete OpenStack tutorials collection for more great guides and hints. Did we miss something great which was published in the past month? Please, let us know in the comments!