▤ Stackers Network

Learn OpenStack

Turn an AI assistant into your personal OpenStack tutor — grounded in this week’s real community activity.

You don’t need to be a developer, and you don’t need to know OpenStack yet. An AI coding agent reads a curated OpenStack knowledge base and walks you through it — explaining concepts, quizzing you, and even guiding a real deployment step by step. Here’s how to start in a few minutes.

Get started

Three steps

  1. Get an AI coding agent. These are apps you chat with in plain English; they can read files, fetch pages, and run commands for you. Any of these work — pick one and follow its setup:
    • Claude Code — npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
    • opencode — npm install -g opencode-ai
    • Codex CLI — npm install -g @openai/codex
    New to this? After installing, run its command (e.g. claude) in a terminal to start a chat session.
  2. Point it at Stackers. In the chat, paste this and send it: 
    Read https://stackers.network/learn.md and teach me OpenStack.
    The agent loads the knowledge base and becomes your tutor.
  3. Tell it how you want to learn. Pick a mode below — or just say what you’re trying to do (“I want to deploy a small test cloud”).
Prefer to work offline, or want the whole knowledge base locally?

Clone the repo and point your agent at the folder — it works with no website at all: 

git clone https://github.com/stackers-network/openstack-knowledge

Then open your agent in that folder and say “teach me OpenStack.” It reads CLAUDE.md and takes it from there.

Ways to learn

Tell the agent any of these — in your own words is fine.

orient

“Where do I start with OpenStack?”

Survey what's here and recommend a path based on the learner's goal and level.

train

“Teach me OpenStack fresh.”

Assess level, build a curriculum from core/, teach concepts then procedures with exercises.

guide

“Guide me through a deployment.”

Task-oriented walkthrough — assess the environment, build a plan, execute step by step (drives deploy/).

What it can teach you

The full knowledge base. You can also browse any topic here directly.

Core services

  • architecture — How OpenStack services fit together; control vs compute plane
  • deployment-overview — Deployment methods compared (kolla-ansible, OpenStack-Ansible, devstack, packages)
  • configuration — Common config patterns: oslo.config, endpoints, message bus, DB
  • identity — Keystone — users, projects, roles, tokens, federation, the service catalog
  • compute — Nova + Placement — instances, flavors, scheduling, live migration
  • networking — Neutron — networks, routers, OVN/OVS backends, floating IPs, security groups
  • block-storage — Cinder — volumes, snapshots, backends, multi-attach
  • image — Glance — images, formats, stores, signing
  • object-storage — Swift — object storage, rings, containers, replication
  • shared-filesystem — Manila — shared file systems, shares, share networks
  • heat — Heat — orchestration templates (HOT), stacks, autoscaling
  • magnum — Magnum — Kubernetes cluster provisioning on OpenStack
  • load-balancing — Octavia — load balancers, listeners, pools, health monitors
  • dns — Designate — DNS zones, records, BIND/pools integration
  • bare-metal — Ironic — bare-metal provisioning, drivers, introspection
  • security — Barbican secrets/certs + cloud hardening guidance
  • dashboard — Horizon and Skyline web dashboards

Deployment (kolla-ansible)

  • config-build — Build globals.yml, inventory, and service configs from operator requirements
  • deploy — Full kolla-ansible lifecycle — bootstrap, prechecks, pull, deploy, post-deploy
  • health-check — Validate environment health — APIs, agents, containers, networking
  • diagnose — Systematic troubleshooting — logs, configs, container state, infrastructure
  • day-two — Day-two ops — add compute, reconfigure, enable services
  • deploy-decision-guides — kolla deployment choices — networking (OVN/OVS) and storage (Ceph/LVM/NFS) backends
  • deploy-compatibility — kolla compatibility — OpenStack release x distro x networking x storage
  • deploy-known-issues — kolla-ansible deployment bugs and workarounds per release

Operations

  • health-check — Cloud/API-level health verification (service-agnostic; complements deploy/health-check)
  • diagnose — General OpenStack troubleshooting across services (complements deploy/diagnose)
  • upgrades — Release upgrades incl. the SLURP path; prechecks, DB backups, sequencing
  • backup-restore — Back up and restore databases and service state
  • capacity-planning — Plan capacity and quotas; size the control and compute planes

Reference

  • decision-guides — Choose deployment tool, networking & storage backends, object store, and dashboard
  • compatibility — Compatibility matrix — services x releases
  • known-issues — Known bugs and workarounds per supported release (2025.1, 2025.2, 2026.1)

Knowledge from the openstack-knowledge project. Lessons can pull live data from this week’s active projects. Independent — not affiliated with the OpenInfra Foundation.