One of the biggest challenges for any system administrator or developer is keeping up with the pace of change. Whether you're fresh out of school, or a veteran greybeard with many years of experience under your belt, the same conundrum applies: the skills you had yesterday aren't always an exact match for the solutions you're working on today to solve for the problems of tomorrow.

This is especially true with cloud technologies. While all of the emerging and maturing open source tools for cloud construction and management certainly offer many benefits, it can be hard to keep up. In the case of OpenStack, official documentation, third-party training and certification, books and other publications, in-person events, and many community-contributed tutorials all help to keep administrators up to speed. To help bring all of these resources together, every month, we round up a collection of new tutorials, how-tos, guides, and tips created by the OpenStack community. Here are some of our favorite pieces published this past month.

OpenStack developers go through a set pattern when contributing code to the upstream: develop locally, test, commit, and wait for the gate tests to run. When a gate test fails, though, it can be tough to figure out why. One way to make understanding the gate tests a little easier is to run a mirror of the remote infrastructure locally. In this guide from Michael Krotscheck, learn how to simulate an OpenStack infrastructure server running on your own computer.

Many OpenStack developers use DevStack to perform their development and tests locally on their machine or on dedicated testing infrastructure. But it can be difficult to understand what's going on with the underlying network code. Skydive is an open source project which helps developers to troubleshoot issues with the software defined networks. Babu Shanmugam explains how to get Skydive working properly with DevStack.

In this guide from Craige McWhirter on debugging Ceph storage attached to OpenStack, he writes “When deleting a volume snapshot in OpenStack you may sometimes get an error message stating that Cinder was unable to delete the snapshot.” To overcome this error, McWhirter describes step by step how to trace and solve the problem.

With so many different components, securing OpenStack can seem like a daunting task. But just like any complex computer system, if you understand what's going on in each part of the system, it's only a matter of making sure each part is correctly set up, patched when needed, and configured with appropriate permissions and safeguards. In this guide, understand some of the places where vulnerabilities could exist, and how to safely address them to ensure that your cloud is secure.

That's all for this month. If you're looking for more, check out our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials, for links to over one hundred additional community-created guides on a wide range of topics for open source cloud builders. Do you have a favorite new guide you think we should feature? Let us know in the comments below and we'll consider it for our next edition.