This article is the first in a new series on DZone where I will identify some useful happenings in the OpenStack community over the previous week. It's designed to work in the same vein as the very useful This Week in Mobile series that my fellow Zone Leader James Sugrue handles. I'm very interested to hear back comments on both the scope of this series (too big? too narrow? should it focus on other cloud news as well?) and on the specific content (what's missing?) I'll read and respond to every comment!

About OpenStack

• Networking got you confused? Don't know your VLAN from your VXLAN? Alok Kumar has started a series on Everything you need to know to get started with Neutron.

• If you're learning about Neutron, unless you've already got OpenStack-aware network equipment, you'll probably find yourself getting friendly with Openvswitch and how it stores its persistent configuration.

• Ronald Bradford explains the Oslo libraries that provide common features used by all the OpenStack projects.

New Features

• OpenStack deployment is ramping up the usage of DevOps tools, especially Ansible. This includes some updates to openstack-ansible-security.

• If you use Heat to orchestrate actions in your OpenStack cloud, there are some new features, including hooks, a way to cause orchestration actions to wait until resources are available, which will make it easier to automate actions without errors.

Commentary and Examples

• Kenneth Hui wants to bore you.

• A snowboard company might not immediately seem like a place to find a private cloud (or at least an instantation of Swift object storage). But when that snowboard company needs to store 160 terabytes of raw video of snowboarders, ad hoc data storage is no longer an option.

• Cray's latest supercomputer uses OpenStack as a platform for Hadoop and Spark.