Originally curated from the OpenStack community and published on opensource.com. Post date: February 2017.
Why OpenStack Skills Still Matter
OpenStack has long been one of the most in-demand open-source skill sets in enterprise IT. Organizations building and managing their own private clouds rely on a broad ecosystem of interrelated projects — from compute and networking to storage and orchestration — that evolve quickly. Staying current requires continuous learning, and the community produces a steady stream of tutorials, cheatsheets, and walkthroughs that complement the official documentation.
The five guides summarized below were gathered from the OpenStack community. Each targets a specific area of the stack, from workflow automation to low-level networking internals.
1. Introduction to Mistral Workflows in TripleO
Author: Julie Pichon
Mistral is OpenStack’s workflow-as-a-service project. It lets you define multi-step processes — sequences of tasks that may depend on each other — and execute them asynchronously. This is particularly useful in deployment pipelines where tasks like provisioning a node, configuring a service, and running health checks must happen in a controlled order without blocking the calling process.
In TripleO (the OpenStack-on-OpenStack deployment tooling), Mistral acts as the execution engine behind many of the operations the TripleO API triggers. Julie Pichon’s guide walks through:
- What Mistral workflows look like (YAML-defined actions and transitions)
- How Mistral integrates with TripleO’s deployment flow
- How to trace and debug workflow execution
This is an excellent starting point if you are new to either Mistral or TripleO and want to understand the automation layer beneath OpenStack deployments.
2. TripleO Cheatsheets for Day-to-Day Operations
TripleO (OpenStack-on-OpenStack) uses OpenStack’s own infrastructure — Heat, Nova, Ironic, and others — to deploy and lifecycle-manage an OpenStack cloud. The tooling is powerful but comes with a steep learning curve. This community-maintained set of cheatsheets compiles commonly needed commands and workflows for engineers who use TripleO regularly.
Typical content in such a reference includes:
- Introspection and node management commands with Ironic
- Stack update and redeploy procedures
- Log locations and how to tail relevant services
- Common debugging steps for failed deployments
The cheatsheets are described as a work in progress open to community contributions, which makes them a living reference rather than a static document.
3. Deploying a Standalone Ceph Cluster with TripleO
Ceph is the distributed storage backend most commonly paired with OpenStack, providing object storage (via RadosGW), block storage (via RBD for Cinder and Nova), and shared filesystems. While Ceph is often deployed as part of a full OpenStack stack, there are scenarios where you need a standalone Ceph cluster — for example, to serve multiple OpenStack environments or to test Ceph independently.
This guide shows how TripleO’s composable roles and Heat templates can be used to stand up a Ceph-only deployment. According to the summary, the process is straightforward:
- Write a short YAML environment file declaring the desired Ceph roles and parameters
- Run a single TripleO deployment command targeting that environment file
- TripleO handles node provisioning, Ceph installation, and initial cluster configuration
This approach gives you a reproducible, infrastructure-as-code Ceph deployment managed through the same toolchain as your OpenStack environment.
4. Creating a Local Copy of the OpenStack CI Grafana Dashboard
OpenStack’s upstream continuous integration infrastructure generates a large volume of metrics — job pass rates, queue lengths, test durations, and more. These are visualized in a public Grafana dashboard that contributors and operators use to monitor the health of the CI system.
If you want to add a new panel, fix a visualization, or experiment with the dashboard configuration, you need a local instance to test against. This guide explains:
- How the upstream Grafana dashboard is structured and where its configuration lives in the OpenStack project repositories
- How to spin up a local Grafana instance and import the dashboard configuration
- How to connect it to a test data source so you can iterate on panels without affecting the production dashboard
- How to submit your changes back upstream via the standard OpenStack code review process
This is particularly useful for new contributors who want to improve observability tooling without risking disruption to the live infrastructure.
5. Open vSwitch Networking Fundamentals for OpenStack
Networking is one of the most complex — and most important — aspects of running OpenStack. The Neutron networking service, along with the Nova compute service, frequently relies on Open vSwitch (OVS) to implement virtual switching, tunneling (VXLAN, GRE), and security group rules on each compute and network node.
This walkthrough demystifies what is happening on the hypervisor host when Neutron creates networks, ports, and routers. Key concepts covered typically include:
- OVS bridge topology: The integration bridge (
br-int), the tunnel bridge (br-tun), and physical network bridges and how they relate - Flow tables: How OVS uses OpenFlow rules to forward, tag, and strip VLAN or tunnel headers
- Port types: Internal ports, patch ports, and physical uplink ports and their roles
- Debugging tools: Commands like
ovs-vsctl show,ovs-ofctl dump-flows, andovs-appctlfor inspecting the live data plane
Understanding OVS at this level is essential for diagnosing connectivity problems in OpenStack clouds and for making informed decisions about networking architectures.
Keeping Your OpenStack Knowledge Current
OpenStack’s component landscape changes with every release cycle. The five guides above represent a snapshot of community knowledge from early 2017, and some implementation details — particularly around TripleO’s CLI and Mistral’s integration — will have evolved since then. Always cross-reference community guides with the official OpenStack documentation for the release you are running.
For training resources, the SCM Galaxy OpenStack training program is one option for structured learning. The OpenStack Foundation (now the Open Infrastructure Foundation) also publishes certification paths and official training partnerships worth exploring.