With the large ecosystem around OpenStack, getting started, learning more, or even just finding the solution to your particular problem can be quite an undertaking. Even if you're a regular contributor to the project, it can be hard to keep up with the rapid pace of development. Fortunately, there are a number of resources to help you out: the official documentation, a number of OpenStack training and certification programs, as well as community-authored tutorials.

Every month, we here at Opensource.com put together a list of the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips to help you keep up with the world's biggest open source cloud project. Here are some of our recent favorites.

Have you ever wanted to try out Trove, OpenStack's database as a service project, but weren't sure where to get started? Tesora, which specializes in cloud database services, get you started in this nine-minute video walkthrough that will take you through the process of deploying and configuring Trove.

With all the buzz around Docker, it's hard not to be curious how it might fit into your OpenStack deployment. Ian Main and Ryan Hallisey of Kolla, a StackForge project that "provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds that are scalable, fast, reliable, and upgradable using community best practices," use TripleO to make a containerized OpenStack solution.

Using OpenContrail, the open source network virtualization platform, with your OpenStack cloud? Ever wondered exactly how it works, transferring a packet from one destination to another? Sylvain Afchain takes you through the journey of a packet within OpenContrail to help you understand how your virtual machines talk to one another or to the outside world.

Installing OpenStack has historically been a difficult process, although a number of packaging efforts have made it much easier in recent years. But the ultimate test of OpenStack know-how still might be installing the project from source. Since OpenStack is written in Python, you can at least skip the compiling step, but it's still a bit of an undertaking. Phil Hopkins walks you through the steps necessary to get an OpenStack installation up and running straight from the raw source code.

As your OpenStack cloud continues to grow, you might choose to change the method by which you store your Glance images. While a simple solution might work well at first, a more robust backend might be necessary as the image collection grows in size. David Moreau Simard provides a great tutorial on migrating your Glance images to a different backend.

When an OpenStack project is ready to graduate from StackForge and move into an existing OpenStack program, a number of steps are required, from editing files that define the project's governance to moving the code repository, and more little things you may not have thought of. When the Heat-Translator project recently went through this process, Sahdev Zala kindly wrote down the process for those who may need to repeat it in the future.

Landing a patch in OpenStack can be a complicated process for a beginner. If you're not familiar with how Gerrit is used for code review, or how Zuul is used to gate the OpenStack repositories to only allow commits which pass certain tests, it's worth reading up a little to understand how it works. If you're interested in learning a little more beyond the basics, Fabien Boucher gives a great deep dive into the Zuul gated commit system that you really should check out.

Finally this month, we want to point you to a handy guide from Doug Hellman that shows you how to set up keyword bookmarks for many of the commonly used destinations for OpenStack developers. If you hack on OpenStack, why not save yourself a little time?

We hope you found this month's collection helpful, and be sure to check out our complete collection of OpenStack tutorials for more great resources. Did we leave out one of your favorites? Use the comments below and let us know.