Building your own cloud can get complex very quickly with all of the various components you need to consider. Sometimes, we all need just a little help. We've collected eight of the best new tips, tricks, and guides in this month's edition of our OpenStack tutorial roundup. Enjoy, and remember, the official documentation for OpenStack is your friend, too.

This month, we look at git tricks to make your OpenStack patches easier for others to digest, using Heat to manage Docker containers, how to delete compute instances directly from the database, and more.

Our first tutorial takes a look at getting VPN as a Service working with OpenStack, by getting OpenVPN running in a virtual machine running in an OpenContrail subnet. OpenContrail is an Apache-licensed project designed to provide services needed for network virtualization and are an alternative way to set up portions of your network. Instructions are given for both Ubuntu as well as CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Docker is clearly generating a lot of excitement in the development community, but how do you get Docker to play nice with your OpenStack cluster? Use OpenStack's own orchestration system, Heat, to get you started. In this guide, the OpenStack integration specialists at eNovance provide instructions and a sample template for getting multi-tenant Docker working using OpenStack Heat.

While this trick isn't for OpenStack itself, if you're an OpenStack contributor, using this trick will make all of your reviewers love your code just a little bit more. Rather than commiting one big code package with lots of different things going on that may be hard to follow, why not split them into smaller, easier-to-understand chunks. Sean Dague provides this guide for splitting up git commits.

DevStack makes a lot of changes to your machine in order to get its environment standardized into a way that all of its components expect. But this might have some unexpected or undesirable results for everything else you do on that machine, so many people choose to run their DevStack tests in a virtual machine. To get easier access to the code, you might want to mount it through NFS. Adam Young has a guide to get that set up in your development environment.

Sometimes things go wrong, and instances can go down in unexpected ways. Even if the instance has disappeared, OpenStack might still think it's there. If this happens, one way to deal with it is to delete these phantom instances directly from OpenStack's database. This guide will show you how to do that with a simple script.

That's it for this month. Check out our past OpenStack tutorials collection for more great guides and hints. And if we missed your favorite new guide or resource, let us know in the comments!