Cloud computing is an immensely complicated subject, and it can be hard to keep pace with the speed of development. When you look at a large collaborative project like OpenStack, it can be easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of pieces of the puzzle you need to be able to put together. But don't worry! There are lots of resources out there to help you, including the official documentation, various OpenStack training and certification programs, as well as tutorials from the community members themselves.

In order to keep you up to speed, every month Opensource.com provides you with the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips published in the previous month, bundled together in one place.

First up is a two part series on Apache ZooKeeper and how it can be used together with OpenStack's Ceilometer to build scalable applications. If you're not already familiar with ZooKeeper, it is a project designed to provide services for creating distributed applications. Coupled with Ceilometer, which collects a number of different metrics from your OpenStack environment, your applications can respond to their environment and scale or change as needed. In this series, Yassine Lamgarchal introduces an improved architecture to provide higher availability to your application by removing the central point of failure.

What if you're just getting started with OpenStack and want to learn about Ceilometer in a safe environment? One option is to install DevStack locally and experiment with Ceilometer in a development environment. It's actually pretty easy; check out this quick walkthrough.

Neutron, the networking component of OpenStack, has a reputation for being difficult to debug when things don't go as expected. Assaf Muller offers a great slide deck detailing some of the common problems encountered when troubleshooting Neutron, along with what might be causing them.

Finally, a look back at a tutorial series we featured last month, which takes you through the process of installing OpenStack from source. In this final installment, learn how to install and configure both the Cinder block storage service and the Horizon dashboard. Missed the previous parts of the series? Take a look back at installing Keystone, Glance and Neutron, and Nova, and then getting Neutron installed on the network node, and installing the compute node.

If you're serious about networking, you'll want a way to control the quality of network service across your OpenStack cloud. If you're using Neutron, you might want to check out the Neutron QoS plugin. Learn how it works in this quick video.

That's it for this month, but be sure to check back and visit our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials for more great resources like theses. And let us know in the comments below if you've got suggestions for our next roundup.