In this blog post, I am going to share some of the best online resources available which you can take or follow to become an expert DevOps professional.

Organizations are expecting new engineers to manage the full lifecycle of their applications. This means continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring constitutes in DevOps Life cycle.

To become an effective DevOps engineer, you need to expand your knowledge about the various tools used in software development to automate your tasks.

There are free resources available where you can spend your time and learn various things by yourself.

Debug.school :- A dedicated DevOps youtube channel which has lots of contents available of DevOps learnings. By subscribing to Debug.School Channel, you’ll never miss out on high-quality video tutorials, class recordings, hands-on lab sessions from industry experts and practitioners. Here you can find curated content on trending topics in the areas of DevOps, AWS, Azure, Automation testing, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform, and many more.

DevOpsSchool:-

DevOpsSchool – YouTube Channel is one of the best YouTube channel we have in the current date, active since 3 yrs. With this channel, you can easily keep track with the ever-evolving DevOps industry, providing video tutorials, live streams, and initiating on-demand video tutoraisl. Here, you can find best and rich contents on almost all the trending stacks of DevOps, Cloud, Container technologies, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, networking, monitoring, career advice and many more. Considering their number of posts and contents on DevOps, we believe that this channel is going to become very popular in the following period.

scmGalaxy:-

This is a channel by the DevOps training community – scmGalaxy – they help IT professionals to get a more engaging learning experience with their paid DevOps training and certification programs. This is one of the oldest channel we have on DevOps domain. They use to upload various parts of their online live sessions recordings on various DevOps related topics. If anyone wants to start their DevOps journey – this is the right place to get all things from scratch.

DevOps Blogs:-

“The best way to learn something is to share others the knowledge that you have gained.” – This platform really follows this line. If you will go this blog platform then you can find various solutions are written and updated here since 2007 which are still valid to get your work done. There are so many problem’s solutions, tutorials, toubleshooting, step-by-step guide, cheatsheet, Interview questions-answers anva various DevOsp learning stuffs you can find easily here.

DevOps Certification

DevOpsSchool is one of growing training and consulting firm run by renowned industry experts. Through individual courses, comprehensive certification programs, and corporate customized training requirements, they provide millions of professionals and thousands of corporate training organizations with the work-ready skills they need to excel in their careers and businesses. Their practical and applied approach has resulted, learners getting job ready skills and real time work exposure after completion of the training. With over thousands of instructor led, live and interactive online sessions and more than 15000 students track record, real-world projects, and more, professionals learn by doing at DevOpsSchool.com every day.

DevOps Videos:-

This platform is a part of DevOpsSchool.com and this url is popular for video tutorials on various technologies related to DevOps stuffs such as Git, Github, jenkins sractch to advance topics, Docker, Terraform, Sonarqube, Maven, Chef, etc. Here you can find all the video tutorials of trending toolsets which required to work on DevOps culture.

DevOps Tutorials:-

One of the consolidated DevOps tutorials platform – where you can find lots of DevOps and related tool sets, PDFs, Slides, Videos, Interview kits, Notes, Commands, CheatSheets, References, Step-by-step guides, Labs excersises, sample pojects, Quizzes etc..

Learning and training is one thing – this will surely help to get a DevOps role. But to make progress, you need to get involved in community activities and events. Take a look into these Communities.

• DevOps India
• DevOps Community

This DevOps Facebook community are focused in sharing and developing professional DevOps skills, ideas, and knowledge and current updates happening in DevOps culture.

GCP or Google Cloud Platform is one of the fastest-growing cloud platforms in the industry. The platform helps manage computing, provide large-capacity data storage, offer robust machine learning services, and more. Here is a list of the best resources to learn GCP online. The courses are meant for students and professionals who want to try their hands on the popular cloud platform.

Google Cloud training
About: This training is provided by the developers of the Google Cloud platform. The tutorials will help you understand how to master implementing, deploying, migrating, and maintaining applications on cloud infrastructure, build cloud-native applications using Google Cloud’s end-to-end solutions, leverage data and gain real-time insights to improve decision-making and accelerate innovation, implement end-to-end machine learning models and learn how to deploy the latest artificial intelligence tools and more.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Fundamentals for Beginners
About: This course provides an overview of the Google Cloud Platform. From the core building blocks such as Compute, Networking, and Storage to the advanced services, this online tutorial helps understand the key concepts and steps on how to start being productive. Each section of this course includes a hands-on demo of one of the key services.

Developing Applications with Google Cloud Platform Specialization
About: In this specialization, you will learn how to design, develop, and deploy applications that seamlessly integrate managed services from GCP. Through a combination of presentations and hands-on labs, you will learn how to use the GCP services and pre-trained machine learning APIs to build secure and intelligent cloud-native applications.

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
About: This course introduces you to essential concepts and terminology for working with GCP. You will learn about various vital resources and policy management tools, such as the Google Cloud Resource Manager hierarchy and Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. You will also learn about many computing and storage services available in Google Cloud Platform, including Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL, and BigQuery.

Google Cloud Platform Full Course
About: This is a three-hour online video tutorial on Google Cloud Platform by Simplilearn. The tutorial covers all the critical concepts of Google Cloud Platform, such as GCP, AWS vs GCP, Google Cloud ML, fundamentals of GCP and more.

GCP: Complete Google Data Engineer and Cloud Architect Guide
About: This course is a comprehensive guide to the Google Cloud Platform for ML with TensorFlow, Big Data with Managed Hadoop. You will learn how to deploy managed Hadoop apps on the Google cloud platform, build deep learning models on the cloud using TensorFlow, use big data technologies such as BigTable, Dataflow, Apache Beam and Pub/Sub, etc.

Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform Specialization
About: In this course, you will learn how to write distributed machine learning models that scale in Tensorflow. You will also learn how to convert raw data to features in a way that allows ML to learn important characteristics from the data and bring human insight to bear on the problem. You will experiment with end-to-end ML, starting from building an ML-focused strategy and progressing into model training, optimization, and productionalization.

Google Cloud Platform Training | Introduction To GCP
About: This is an online video tutorial offered by Edureka. You will get comprehensive training on the Google Cloud Platform. The course starts with the basics of Cloud Computing. As the course progresses, you will understand the GCP core infrastructure, how to manage GCP services such as GCP compute services, GCP database services, GCP security services, GCP networking services, GCP IAM etc.

The resources below are free (or free-to-audit) and span beginner to intermediate levels. They cover core concepts such as pod scheduling, service discovery, persistent storage, role-based access control (RBAC), and multi-tier application deployments.

1. Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine Specialisation (Coursera)

Offered by Google Cloud on Coursera, this specialisation focuses on practical implementation using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Topics include building and scheduling workloads, load balancing, health monitoring, service discovery, RBAC and security configuration, and attaching persistent storage to applications. The course is auditable for free, although a certificate requires payment.

This is a strong choice if you are planning to run Kubernetes workloads specifically on Google Cloud, as it blends Kubernetes fundamentals with GKE-specific tooling and best practices.

2. Introduction to Kubernetes (edX / Linux Foundation)

Hosted on edX and produced by the Linux Foundation, this free-to-audit course provides a solid conceptual and hands-on foundation. You will learn:

• Core Kubernetes architecture (control plane, worker nodes, etcd, API server)
• How to set up a local cluster with Minikube and interact with it using kubectl
• Deploying stand-alone and multi-tier applications
• Working with ConfigMaps and Secrets for configuration management
• Configuring Ingress resources for external traffic routing

This course is well-suited to engineers who have some container experience (e.g., Docker) but are new to orchestration.

3. Learning Path: Kubernetes (IBM Developer)

IBM Developer’s Kubernetes learning path is a structured, multi-module curriculum that takes you from foundational prerequisites to more advanced topics. Key outcomes include:

• Understanding container fundamentals and why orchestration is necessary
• Building containerised applications and deploying them to a Kubernetes cluster
• Using Helm to manage application packaging and deployment
• Deploying microservices architectures on Kubernetes
• Understanding Kubernetes networking concepts (Services, DNS, ingress controllers)

The IBM Developer learning paths are self-paced and browser-based, making them easy to work through incrementally alongside a real project.

4. Learn Kubernetes Basics (Official Kubernetes Documentation)

The official Kubernetes interactive tutorial on kubernetes.io is the most authoritative starting point available. Divided into six modules, it walks you through:

• Creating a Kubernetes cluster
• Deploying a containerised application
• Exploring and debugging your app using kubectl
• Exposing the application publicly via a Service
• Scaling the deployment horizontally
• Performing a rolling update to deploy a new application version with zero downtime

Each module includes an embedded interactive terminal running a real Minikube cluster, so you do not need to install anything locally to complete the exercises. This is the ideal first stop for anyone brand new to Kubernetes.

5. Fundamentals of Containers, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift (edX)

Produced by Red Hat and hosted on edX, this course introduces container and orchestration technology through a practical lens, using Docker, Kubernetes, and the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Learning objectives include:

• Containerising existing applications and services using Docker
• Managing container images and container lifecycles
• Building custom container images
• Deploying containerised applications onto an OpenShift cluster

This course is particularly relevant for teams working in enterprise environments where OpenShift is the preferred Kubernetes distribution, or for engineers who want to understand how OpenShift extends upstream Kubernetes.

6. A Tutorial Introduction to Kubernetes (Ulaş Türkmen’s Blog)

This community-contributed tutorial by Ulaş Türkmen provides a practical, hands-on introduction to running Kubernetes locally with Minikube. It covers:

• Configuring kubectl to communicate with your cluster
• Understanding nodes and namespaces
• Navigating the Kubernetes Dashboard
• Deploying container images and observing Kubernetes features in action
• Exposing deployments as Services

Community blog posts like this are often more concise and opinionated than official documentation, making them useful complements when you want a quick walkthrough without extensive background reading.

7. Introduction to Kubernetes (Linux Foundation — LFS158x)

The Linux Foundation’s standalone course LFS158x on edX covers Kubernetes from first principles with a focus on portability and open standards rather than any single cloud provider. Topics include:

• What container orchestration is and why it matters
• Kubernetes architecture and its major components
• Setting up and accessing a local cluster with Minikube
• Deploying stand-alone and multi-tier applications
• Kubernetes volume management and persistent storage concepts

Because the Linux Foundation is one of the stewards of the Kubernetes project itself, this course closely tracks upstream project developments and is regularly updated.

Choosing the Right Starting Point

If you are completely new to Kubernetes, begin with the official interactive tutorial on kubernetes.io (resource 4) to get hands-on experience without any local setup. Follow it with either the Linux Foundation edX course (resource 7) or the IBM Developer learning path (resource 3) for a more structured curriculum. Once you have the fundamentals, the GKE specialisation (resource 1) or the Red Hat OpenShift course (resource 5) will sharpen your skills for a specific platform environment.

All seven resources are free to access in audit mode or without registration, making them accessible regardless of budget. The investment required is time and practice — ideally alongside a real or local cluster.

A Brief History of MSDN Magazine

The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was launched in 1992, at a time when personal computing was becoming mainstream and the internet was beginning to gain widespread adoption. The developer-focused publication originally existed as two separate journals: Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) and Microsoft Internet Developer (MIND). Recognizing the significant overlap in audience and subject matter, Microsoft merged the two publications in 2000 under the unified MSDN Magazine banner.

Over the decades, the magazine evolved considerably. It began with a strong focus on the Windows operating system — Microsoft’s flagship product — but gradually expanded its editorial scope to cover the full breadth of Microsoft’s growing portfolio of services and platforms. Long-time subscribers will remember the era when each monthly issue was bundled with a CD containing software demos, code samples, and product previews.

In its later years, the print edition was available only in the United States, while readers in other regions received a digital subscription. Despite its niche audience — software developers, system administrators, coders, and IT professionals — the magazine maintained strong credibility and loyalty within the Microsoft developer ecosystem.

Why Did Microsoft Shut Down MSDN Magazine?

Microsoft did not provide a single definitive reason for discontinuing the publication, but several converging factors likely contributed to the decision.

• The decline of print media: Physical publications across all industries have experienced declining readership over the past decade, and technical journals are no exception. The CD bundling that once made MSDN Magazine a tangible, hands-on resource had already become obsolete long before the magazine’s closure.
• The rise of online documentation: Microsoft has invested heavily in docs.microsoft.com, a continuously updated, searchable, community-contributed documentation platform. This repository covers the full range of Microsoft technologies in a format that is more accessible and easier to keep current than a monthly print or digital magazine.
• The GitHub acquisition: Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. GitHub serves as a vast, living repository of code samples, open-source tools, and developer collaboration — much of what the magazine historically provided in a static format.
• Expanded product surface: Microsoft’s portfolio has grown enormously since 1992, spanning Azure cloud services, DevOps tooling, AI and machine learning platforms, cross-platform development frameworks, and more. A monthly magazine format is ill-suited to covering such a rapidly moving target.

Microsoft acknowledged the shift in a public statement at the time of the announcement:

“As Microsoft products and services expanded exponentially over the years, MSDN Magazine has gone through its own evolution, as well. We realized that it is time to retire MSDN Magazine and to carry on its work through Web channels like docs.microsoft.com.”

What Happened to Existing Subscribers?

Microsoft stated that subscribers who had paid for time beyond the November 2019 final issue would receive a pro-rated refund based on the remaining subscription period. All previously published issues of MSDN Magazine were made available online, preserving the archive for developers who rely on older articles for reference.

Where Should Developers Go Now?

Microsoft directed former MSDN Magazine readers to the following resources:

• docs.microsoft.com — The primary destination for Microsoft developer documentation, API references, tutorials, and platform guidance. Content is organized by product and technology area and is updated continuously.
• GitHub (github.com/microsoft) — Microsoft’s GitHub organization hosts open-source projects, sample code repositories, and SDKs across its product lines. Developers can contribute to projects, file issues, and follow development activity directly.
• Microsoft Learn — A guided learning platform offering structured learning paths and modules covering Azure, .NET, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft technologies.
• Microsoft Tech Community — A forum-based community platform where developers and IT professionals can ask questions, share knowledge, and follow product blogs from Microsoft engineering teams.

The Broader Significance for Developer Communities

The closure of MSDN Magazine is part of a broader industry pattern. Long-running technical print publications — including those covering Linux, Java, and other ecosystems — have largely migrated online or ceased publication entirely over the past decade. The economics of print and the pace of modern software development are fundamentally at odds: by the time an article reaches subscribers, the technology it describes may have already shipped a new version.

For the Microsoft developer community specifically, the shift reflects how the company’s own relationship with developers has changed. Microsoft now engages developers through open-source contributions on GitHub, real-time documentation updates on docs.microsoft.com, live streaming on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and developer-focused conferences such as Microsoft Build. These channels offer a speed and interactivity that a monthly magazine cannot match.

While long-time readers may feel a sense of loss at the passing of a 30-year institution, the resources that replace MSDN Magazine are, in most practical respects, more comprehensive, more current, and more accessible than any print publication could be.

Where CIOs Stand on DevOps

A TechRepublic CIO Jury survey asked IT leaders whether they had implemented DevOps or had concrete plans to do so. Results were split evenly. The six leaders on the pro-DevOps side cited improved team communication, smoother testing cycles, increased productivity, and faster time to market as primary drivers. Those on the other side reported that they were either not organizationally ready or remained unconvinced of DevOps’s practical value for their context.

That split reflects a genuine tension in enterprise IT. DevOps is not a plug-and-play solution — it requires deliberate investment in tooling, process, and people. The resources below help CIOs and IT leaders assess the opportunity, avoid common traps, and navigate the culture question that almost always surfaces during adoption discussions.

1. The Case for DevOps: Where It’s Going and How to Get Value From It

Source: ZDNet — In a piece by Mark Samuels, several IT leaders articulate the tangible upside of a DevOps approach. Paul Pogonoski, Director of Cloud Foundation Services at Capgemini, summarised the benefit of iterative development: organisations that embrace it can break work into smaller increments, fail fast, and create a structured environment for experimentation and learning. These are not abstract principles — they translate directly into reduced release risk and shorter feedback loops between development and operations teams.

Key themes from this coverage include:

• Iterative delivery: Smaller, more frequent releases reduce blast radius when things go wrong.
• Fail fast culture: Teams surface problems earlier in the development cycle, when fixes are cheaper.
• Experimentation: DevOps toolchains and practices give teams the safety net to try new approaches without risking production stability.
• Improved collaboration: Breaking down silos between dev, ops, and QA leads to shared ownership of reliability and quality.

2. Nine Mistakes DevOps Teams Make — and How to Avoid Them

Source: InformationWeek — Cynthia Harvey provides a practical counterpoint: DevOps benefits are not automatic. Her article identifies nine common mistakes that can undermine even well-intentioned DevOps initiatives. These pitfalls are worth reviewing before a rollout, not after.

Two of the most frequently cited mistakes are:

• Prioritising speed over quality: Continuous delivery pipelines can create pressure to ship faster, but without adequate automated testing and quality gates, velocity becomes a liability rather than an asset.
• Neglecting culture change: Tooling alone does not create DevOps. If development and operations teams still operate with adversarial mindsets or misaligned incentives, automation only accelerates dysfunction.

Other commonly flagged mistakes include insufficient monitoring and observability, failing to involve security teams early (a precursor to the DevSecOps model), and treating DevOps as a one-time project rather than an ongoing operational discipline.

3. Which Comes First — DevOps or Culture Change?

Source: InformationWeek — Eric Bruno addresses one of the most debated questions in DevOps adoption: does cultural change need to precede the implementation of DevOps practices, or does adopting DevOps tooling and workflows organically drive cultural change over time?

Bruno’s conclusion is nuanced and practically useful: rather than treating cultural change as a prerequisite gate or a downstream outcome, organisations should treat it as a continuous improvement target — one that evolves alongside, not before or after, technical adoption.

This framing is important for CIOs who feel they cannot begin a DevOps programme because their culture “isn’t ready.” The evidence suggests that waiting for a perfect cultural moment is itself a mistake. Starting with a bounded pilot — a single product team, a single pipeline — and using the results to demonstrate value is often a more effective catalyst for cultural change than any top-down mandate.

Key Takeaways for CIOs Evaluating DevOps

• The business case is real but context-dependent. Improved time to market, higher deployment frequency, and better cross-team communication are consistently cited benefits — but they require deliberate organisational investment to realise.
• Common mistakes are avoidable. Auditing your team’s readiness against known failure patterns before you start saves significant remediation effort later.
• Culture and tooling are co-evolutionary. Do not use cultural immaturity as a reason to delay; use a phased adoption approach to evolve both together.
• Security and quality must be built in. Speed without quality gates and security integration creates technical debt and risk, not competitive advantage.

For IT leaders still assessing whether DevOps is the right move, these three perspectives — the value case, the risk inventory, and the culture question — form a solid starting framework for a structured evaluation.

The following curated list — originally sourced from Threat Stack — covers conferences, websites, training courses, books, social media accounts, and online communities worth exploring as you build your security knowledge.

1. Conferences

In-person conferences remain one of the most effective ways to learn from practitioners and build a network in a new discipline. Several events are particularly well-suited to DevOps engineers exploring security.

Security BSides is a community-driven conference series with events held in cities around the world. The format is deliberately accessible — BSides events are designed to welcome newcomers alongside veterans, making them a low-barrier entry point into the security community.

DevOpsDays events have incorporated a growing volume of security content into their programs. Attendees at recent DevOpsDays events have reported that a significant portion of talks touched on security topics, reflecting how central security has become to modern DevOps practice. DevOpsDays events are held in cities globally throughout the year; check devopsdays.org for the current schedule.

Larger industry conferences such as LISA (hosted by USENIX) and Velocity also regularly include security-focused sessions. Reviewing the published schedules from previous years is a useful way to gauge whether a given conference will deliver content relevant to your needs before you commit to attending.

2. Websites

A handful of security-focused websites consistently publish high-quality, practical content that is relevant to engineers working in cloud and DevOps environments.

• Medium’s Starting Up Security — A publication focused on practical, actionable security guidance for engineering and product teams. Topics range from building a product security function to investigating cloud audit logs.
• Krebs on Security (krebsonsecurity.com) — Run by independent journalist Brian Krebs, this site covers real-world cybercrime, data breaches, and emerging threats in depth. It is a good resource for understanding what kinds of attacks are active in the wild and how organizations are affected.
• Threatpost (threatpost.com) — An independent security news site covering vulnerabilities, cloud security, IoT threats, and policy developments. It provides broad coverage that helps engineers stay aware of the current threat landscape.

Beyond these, look for blogs maintained by security researchers and vendors in the DevSecOps space. Many publish detailed post-mortems, threat analyses, and implementation guides that are directly applicable to infrastructure and application work.

3. Training Courses and Certifications

If you want structured, verifiable security education, SANS Institute is one of the most respected providers in the field. SANS offers both live in-person courses and on-demand online training covering a wide range of security disciplines, from security operations to cloud security to application security.

SANS also administers the GIAC (Global Information Assurance Certification) program, which produces role-specific credentials that are well-regarded by employers. For those seeking a more comprehensive academic qualification, SANS offers a Master of Science in Information Security Engineering (MSISE).

Importantly, SANS maintains a free library of whitepapers, research, and reading room materials. This is a useful starting point before committing to a paid course.

Other training platforms worth exploring include:

• Cybrary — Free and paid courses covering security fundamentals and certifications.
• Offensive Security — Hands-on, practical training for those interested in penetration testing and offensive security techniques.
• Cloud provider security training — AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure all offer security-focused learning paths and certifications relevant to DevOps engineers working in those environments.

4. Books

For engineers who prefer to learn from books, a few titles stand out as particularly useful starting points.

DevOpsSec by O’Reilly Media — This eBook uses real-world case studies to explain how security practices can be integrated into a DevOps workflow. It was available as a free download from O’Reilly at the time of the original article; availability may have changed.

Security Engineering by Ross Anderson — A comprehensive textbook covering information security from foundational principles to complex real-world systems. It is not a hands-on implementation guide, but it provides the conceptual grounding that makes other security learning click. A free version of an earlier edition has been made available by the author on his university webpage.

Other books worth noting for DevOps engineers include The Phoenix Project for organizational context, and O’Reilly titles on specific topics such as web application security, container security, and cloud security architecture.

5. Social Media and Security Practitioners to Follow

Twitter (now X) has historically been a primary channel for the security community to share research, disclose vulnerabilities, and discuss emerging threats in near real-time. Following practitioners gives you a pulse on what is happening in the field before it appears in formal publications.

The following handles were recommended by Threat Stack as useful accounts for DevOps engineers interested in security. Note that account activity and relevance may have changed since the original article was published in 2017:

• @duo_labs
• @duosec
• @pwnallthethings
• @robertmlee
• @hacks4pancakes
• @benjammingh
• @alexstamos
• @tqbf
• @thegrugg
• @jessysaurusrex
• @taviso
• @dguido
• @flyryan

Beyond Twitter/X, LinkedIn has grown as a platform for security professionals sharing long-form analysis. Mastodon’s infosec community (infosec.exchange) has also become active as an alternative social platform for the security field.

6. Forums and Online Communities

Engaging with communities where you can ask questions and discuss real problems accelerates learning considerably.

• HangOps #infosec (Slack) — A Slack community for operations and DevOps practitioners with a dedicated infosec channel. Access is available at signup.hangops.com.
• Information Security Stack Exchange (security.stackexchange.com) — A Q&A forum with a large, active community covering a broad range of security topics. The question archive alone is a valuable reference.
• Reddit — Subreddits such as r/netsec, r/devops, and r/AskNetsec contain active discussions and resource-sharing relevant to engineers at all levels.
• OWASP Community — The Open Worldwide Application Security Project maintains active working groups, local chapters, and a Slack workspace focused on application security.

Getting Started

Security can feel like a vast and opaque domain when you are coming at it from a development or operations background. The resources above are a practical starting point rather than an exhaustive curriculum. A reasonable approach is to begin with one or two website subscriptions to build awareness of current threats, attend a local BSides or DevOpsDays event to build community connections, and work through a structured SANS course or certification if you need to demonstrate formal competency.

The most important step is simply to start. Security knowledge compounds over time, and even a basic grounding in the principles will make you a significantly more effective DevOps engineer.

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, and ovs-appctl for 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.