OpenStack is a big project, and keeping it all running smoothly (or just learning what how to get started) can be a big undertaking. Even if you're a contributor to the project, there's a lot to keep track of, especially with the projects you might be less familiar with. Of course, the official documentation as well as a number of OpenStack training and certification programs can be a big help with learning more, but community-authored tutorials are a great supplement.

Every month, Opensource.com pulls together the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips into one place so you can sample some of the best community-produced resources to help you with your OpenStack journey. Without further ado, here's what we've gathered for you this month.

First up, let's take a look at automating the backup of your Cinder volumes. Cinder, the block storage project within OpenStack, allows your VMs to have volumes attached to them that persist even if the VM stops. But what are you doing to make sure these volumes are safe and secure in the event of a failure? Gorka Eguileor takes you through the basics.

Next, let's take a look at a popular storage option for OpenStack, GlusterFS. Swapnil Kulkarni takes a look at installing and configuring RDO with GlusterFS to get your storage back-end up and running.

We also enjoyed reading through a trio of OpenStack tips from Loïc Dachary. The first was how to set up a custom name server on an OpenStack instance. Cloud-init makes this relatively easy. Another looked at how to name an OpenStack instance based on its IP address, which certainly makes keeping track of your instances easier. Finally, let's look at how to delete the last port of an OpenStack router, a one-liner in case you're having trouble with Neutron router-delete complaining.

Upgrades aren't as difficult within OpenStack as they were just a few years ago, with a number of efforts being made to make it easier to move from one version to another. With a six-month release cycle, being able to upgrade regularly can be important! To that end, here's a walk through of upgrading Nova to Kilo with minimal downtime.

Heat: It's the native orchestration tool in OpenStack, designed to make deploying elastic cloud applications simple. What if you want to make sure your newly launched instance with Heat is IPv6 ready? Shannon McFarland shows you how.

In this next guide, Craige McWhirter writes "When deleting a volume snapshot in OpenStack you may sometimes get an error message stating that Cinder was unable to delete the snapshot. There are a number of reasons why a snapshot may be reported by Ceph as unable to be deleted, however the most common reason in my experience has been that a Cinder client connection has not yet been closed, possibly because a client crashed." Here's his guide for getting around that error.

Finally this month, we look at two quick guides from Matt Farina, who shows us how to theme the OpenStack dashboard in Kilo, and takes it further with how to build custom AngularJS panels to extend the Horizon dashboard even further.

Thanks for taking a look at this month's collection, and be sure to check out our complete OpenStack tutorials catalog for more great guides and how-tos. Got a great suggestion for next month's roundup? Leave it in the comments below!