Best OpenStack Books for 2026: Kolla, Networking and COA Prep

Most of the OpenStack books worth buying were written for Pike or Queens, two releases that reached end of life in October 2022 and January 2023. The age is measurable. We pulled every openstack command from the companion repositories of three picks and parsed each one with the current client. In the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook repository, 184 of the 219 distinct lines still parse on python-openstackclient 10.4.0 (checked October 2026, the newest client on PyPI during the 2026.2 Hibiscus cycle).

Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 25969

Five OpenStack books follow, from the newest Kolla-Ansible title to a 2018 networking book whose concepts outlived its commands. Each pick names the release it was written for and what changed upstream since it was printed. We did not deploy a cloud for this page; the checks ran against the clients, the release notes and the books’ own code, which is where most of the breakage sits.

OpenStack Books Compared by Target Release

Each row gives the release a book was written for, taken from its companion repository or publisher page, and where that release stands on the OpenStack release schedule. Page counts and prices come from the Amazon listing on October 19, 2026:

Book	Publisher, print date	Pages	Written for	Status of that release	Price when we checked
Mastering OpenStack, 3rd Ed	Packt, Nov 2024	392	Antelope (2023.1) or later, Kolla-Ansible	Antelope is unmaintained	about $52
Certified OpenStack Administrator Study Guide, 2nd Ed	Apress, Oct 2022	267	The Yoga version of the COA exam	Yoga is unmaintained	about $39
OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, 4th Ed	Packt, Jan 2018	398	Pike, OpenStack-Ansible 16.0.5	End of life Oct 2022	about $58
Learning OpenStack Networking, 3rd Ed	Packt, Aug 2018	462	Pike on Ubuntu 16.04	End of life Oct 2022	about $58
OpenStack for Architects, 2nd Ed	Packt, May 2018	256	RHEL 7 or CentOS 7, 4 to 12 servers	Code uses APIs removed in Queens	about $41

Only one book targets a release newer than 2022, and even Antelope left maintenance before this page was written. That is the state of the category: the maintained releases are 2025.1 Epoxy, which is due to move to unmaintained; 2025.2 Flamingo; 2026.1 Gazpacho, the newest SLURP release and the one skip-level upgrades land on; and 2026.2 Hibiscus, released on September 30, 2026. No book from a major publisher covers any of them. The table still sorts the picks well, because the further a book sits from 2026.1, the more of its value is in the concepts rather than the commands.

For a quick decision, the split looks like this:

• Deploying a cloud now: Mastering OpenStack, Third Edition, because it is the only pick built on Kolla-Ansible.
• Sitting the COA exam: the Certified OpenStack Administrator Study Guide, the newest exam-specific book from a major publisher.
• Learning Neutron: Learning OpenStack Networking, read for the concepts and the packet paths, not the install chapters.
• Designing for an organization: OpenStack for Architects, which is about decisions and has almost no commands to break.

How We Picked and What We Ran

The shortlist started from a census of the Amazon catalog through the Creators API: a 260-result OpenStack search plus a pass over the shelf of each publisher (Packt, Apress, O’Reilly, Manning, Wiley, Pearson, BPB). The newest O’Reilly OpenStack title is from 2016, the only Manning title is OpenStack in Action from the same year, and nothing from Wiley or Pearson is newer. We left out the 2024 to 2026 small-press and self-published OpenStack titles, because none of them has a publisher page or code repository we could check the contents against.

Three picks publish their code on GitHub, so the commands could be measured instead of judged. The method:

• Extraction: every distinct line starting with openstack in the Cookbook, Networking and Mastering repositories, 314 lines in total.
• Parser: each line fed to the argument parser of the matching command class in python-openstackclient 10.4.0, the newest release on PyPI that day, preferring identity v3, image v2 and volume v3. A line passes when the command and every flag exist.
• What a pass means: the syntax is current. It does not prove the API call succeeds against a cloud, and no cloud was involved.
• Cross-check: every failure traced to the python-openstackclient, Neutron and Kolla-Ansible release notes.

You can reproduce the headline checks on any machine with Python and uv, because none of them needs a cloud. Create a virtual environment and install the three clients the books lean on:

uv venv osc
uv pip install --python osc/bin/python python-openstackclient python-novaclient python-neutronclient
export PATH="$PWD/osc/bin:$PATH"

Then ask the client about two commands the Cookbook prints, and check for the two legacy CLIs that older books teach:

openstack --version
openstack help snapshot create
openstack help server migrate | grep -E -- "--live|--host"
nova --version
command -v neutron || echo "neutron: not installed"

On our run the old snapshot command was gone, the live migration flag had a new name, and only one of the two legacy CLIs still existed:

openstack 10.4.0
Unknown command ['snapshot', 'create']
usage: openstack server migrate [-h] [--live-migration] [--host <hostname>]
  --live-migration      Live migrate the server; use the ``--host`` option to
  --host <hostname>     Migrate the server to the specified host. (supported
                        with the --live-migration option) (supported with
                        without the --live-migration option)
nova CLI is deprecated and will be removed in a future release
18.13.1
neutron: not installed

The nova command still answers, with a deprecation warning on every call, while python-neutronclient 14.0.0 installs no neutron command at all. Any book chapter written around neutron net-create or neutron lbaas-loadbalancer-create therefore fails at the first line. That is why the picks below are judged on how much of their teaching uses the unified openstack client.

The repository results, per book:

Repository	Distinct lines	Parse on 10.4.0	Removed syntax	Copy-paste traps	Garbled in the repo	Not testable
OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, 4th Ed	219	184	2	7	9	17
Learning OpenStack Networking, 3rd Ed	91	84	0	0	0	7
Mastering OpenStack, 3rd Ed	4	2	0	0	2	0

“Not testable” covers lines our extractor cut short at a placeholder such as <domain>, or bare command stubs with their arguments on another line, so they say nothing either way. The copy-paste traps are worse than they look. Seven Cookbook lines carry curly quotes or an en or em dash where a hyphen or double hyphen belongs, four in the chapter 2 quick reference and three in chapter 7. A shell passes those characters through as literal text. Mastering OpenStack has only four openstack lines because it drives everything through Kolla-Ansible configuration, which is a different kind of age problem.

What Changed in OpenStack Since These Books Were Printed

Most of the drift comes from a handful of upstream removals. Each row below is taken from the release notes of the project named, and the last column says which pick it affects:

Change	When	What to do instead	Pick affected
snapshot create and the other bare snapshot commands removed from the client	Deprecated in Ocata, removed in Train	openstack volume snapshot create	Cookbook (chapter 2)
server migrate --live <host> removed	Deprecated in Train, removed in Wallaby	--live-migration --host <host>	Cookbook (chapter 5)
neutron CLI removed from python-neutronclient	10.0.0, 2023.2 cycle	The openstack network, subnet and router commands	Networking (chapter 13)
Linux bridge ML2 driver removed from Neutron	2025.1 Epoxy	Open vSwitch, or preferably OVN	Networking (chapters 4, 10, 11)
neutron-lbaas retired	Repository no longer maintained	Octavia	Networking, Cookbook
Swift deployment dropped from Kolla-Ansible	Kolla-Ansible 20.0.0 (2025.1)	An external Swift-compatible store such as Ceph RGW	Mastering (chapter 5)
Zun and Kuryr dropped from Kolla-Ansible	Kolla-Ansible 22.0.0 (2026.1)	Magnum or a Kubernetes cluster on instances	Mastering (chapter 4)
Keystone v2.0 API and Ceilometer API removed	Queens	Keystone v3 tokens, Gnocchi for metrics	Architects (chapter 6 code)

The Linux bridge removal is the one that changes how a networking book reads. The Neutron 2025.1 release notes advise moving to Open vSwitch or, preferably, OVN before upgrading, and Kolla-Ansible removed its Linux bridge support in the same cycle. A 2018 book that builds its first network on the Linux bridge agent now teaches a driver that no supported release ships.

Red Hat moved too. Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift became generally available on August 26, 2024, as the next major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform. It runs the control plane on OpenShift, a different layout from the RHEL 7 era that the Architects book plans for. If your target is a Red Hat subscription, the deployment chapters of every pick here describe a different product.

Unknown command [‘snapshot’, ‘create’]

This is what the client prints for the snapshot recipe in chapter 2 of the Cookbook. The bare snapshot commands were deprecated in Ocata, before the book went to press, and removed in Train. The replacement takes the volume as an option and the snapshot name as the positional argument:

openstack volume snapshot create --volume myVolume myVolumeSnapshot

Chapter 7 of the same book already uses this form, so the quick reference simply lagged the chapter it summarizes.

fatal: Remote branch 16.05 not found in upstream origin

Chapter 1 of the Cookbook clones OpenStack-Ansible with git clone -b 16.05, and that ref does not exist. We ran the line with a scratch destination and then listed the real tags:

git clone -b 16.05 https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible.git /tmp/osa-test
git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible.git 16.0.5 pike-eol

Git refused the branch, and the tag the book meant turned up next to the Pike end-of-life tag:

fatal: Remote branch 16.05 not found in upstream origin
8cd19f292dcb7556b9bcf195f4e921e1731afc2a	refs/tags/16.0.5
854fc2437cfc03af94ba48c1db11bdb24efac880	refs/tags/pike-eol

16.0.5 is the tag the book meant. We did not build a Pike cloud from it, and on Ubuntu 16.04, past its standard support, the bootstrap’s pip and git dependencies may no longer resolve, so treat it as a lab experiment at best. For a cloud you intend to keep, take the deployment method from our Kolla-Ansible install on Rocky Linux 10 and use the Cookbook for the day-two recipes.

1. Mastering OpenStack, Third Edition

For a cloud you are building this year, the third edition by Omar Khedher is the pick:

It is the only pick built on Kolla-Ansible, which deploys every OpenStack service as a container and is the method our own install guides use. The companion repository asks for Antelope or later. Its eight code chapters walk one deployment from a DevSecOps setup with Jenkins and Anchore image scanning through the shared control plane, compute, and block, object and file storage. The second half adds OVN networking with Octavia, high availability with HAProxy and Keepalived, monitoring with Prometheus, OpenSearch and Grafana, and benchmarking with Rally and Watcher. The later chapters cover hybrid cloud, and the software list includes an AWS account.

Two things need fixing before you copy its configuration, because both make a reader deploy something other than a supported release:

• Release pin: seven of the eight globals.yml files in the repository set openstack_release: "master", and chapter 2 installs Kolla-Ansible from the master branch, so even the eighth file lands on untested development images. The Kolla-Ansible documentation installs from stable/2026.2 instead, on Debian 13, Rocky Linux 10 or Ubuntu 24.04. The two must match: install Kolla-Ansible from stable/2026.2, then delete the openstack_release line, because that branch already defaults it to "2026.2".
• Removed services: Kolla-Ansible stopped deploying Swift in 2025.1 and dropped Zun in 2026.1, so the object storage and container service sections of chapters 4 and 5 no longer deploy as written.

Neither problem touches the design chapters, which is where the book earns its place. Fix the release pin first and skip the two dropped services, and the rest of the repository describes a layout that current Kolla-Ansible still supports. That is worth the edit, because the Kolla-based high availability chapter and the Rally and Watcher benchmarking chapter cover ground no other pick here touches. The main catch left is in chapter 9, whose enable_elasticsearch line current Kolla-Ansible silently ignores, because it now ships OpenSearch in its place: delete the line and set enable_osprofiler: "yes" in globals.yml, which turns OpenSearch on for the profiler data.

Operators and architects who already know the core services get the most from it, and Packt recommends prior OpenStack knowledge. Skip it if you want each service installed by hand to learn what it does, because the Networking book does more of that. The paperback was about $52 when we checked. Check the current price on Amazon.

2. Certified OpenStack Administrator Study Guide, Second Edition

Andrey Markelov rewrote this Apress guide for the Yoga version of the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam:

The Springer page says every exercise was rewritten for that exam version with the unified openstack client. Each topic is shown on the command line and in Horizon, and review questions follow every one of the 11 chapters. That matches how the exam works. The COA page describes a three-hour, online-proctored, hands-on exam that mixes the CLI and Horizon, costs $400, allows no retakes and stays valid for 36 months.

Markelov has taught Red Hat and Microsoft authorized courses and holds a Mirantis COA, so the book reads like course material rather than a reference. Because it stays on the client and the dashboard instead of a deployment tool, less of it depends on removed tooling than its 2022 date suggests. Skip it if the job is designing or deploying a cloud, because it assumes one already exists. The COA page shows the Caracal (2024.1) logo under “OpenStack release being tested”, four releases past the book’s Yoga, so check the exam handbook before you book. It was about $39 when we checked in October 2026. Check the current price on Amazon.

3. OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, Fourth Edition

The title our Search Console data shows people looking for most is a recipe book from four OpenStack practitioners:

Kevin Jackson, Cody Bunch, Egle Sigler and James Denton build a Pike cloud with OpenStack-Ansible in a VirtualBox and Vagrant lab. They then work through identity, images, compute, Neutron, Cinder, Swift, Heat and Horizon one task at a time. The task format is why it survives: of its 219 distinct openstack lines, 184 still parse on the current client. The two lines that use removed syntax are the bare snapshot create and server migrate --live <host>, both covered above.

The deployment chapter is the part to skip, since its 16.05 clone fails and Pike reached end of life in October 2022. The chapter 2 quick reference is the other weak spot, holding most of the 9 garbled lines, such as --container-type where --container-format belongs. Read the recipes against a current cloud, for example a DevStack lab on Ubuntu, and retype any line that holds curly quotes. Skip it if design guidance is the goal; it tells you how, rarely why. It was about $58 when we checked. Check the current price on Amazon.

4. Learning OpenStack Networking, Third Edition

James Denton, then a principal architect at Rackspace, wrote this 462-page Neutron book:

Across 14 chapters it installs Pike on Ubuntu 16.04. It then builds provider and tenant networks, legacy and highly available routers with VRRP, distributed virtual routing, security groups and load balancers, with captured namespace and bridge output along the way. All 84 testable openstack lines in its repository parse on the current client, the best result of the three repositories. The commands it teaches are fine.

The drivers are not. Chapter 4 installs the Linux bridge agent, and the router chapters run on the Linux bridge interface driver, which Neutron removed in 2025.1. Chapter 13 builds load balancers with the neutron-lbaasv2-agent and neutron lbaas commands, and both the project and that CLI are gone, replaced by Octavia. The Open vSwitch and DVR chapters carry over best, and the concepts behind every chapter still apply. Pair it with our guide to creating OpenStack networks and subnets for the current syntax. Skip it if your cloud runs OVN; its repository never mentions OVN. It was about $58 when we checked. Check the current price on Amazon.

5. OpenStack for Architects, Second Edition

Ben Silverman and Michael Solberg wrote the one pick about decisions rather than commands:

It leads you through the major decision points of architecting an OpenStack private cloud for an organization, including containerization, NFV and security. The labs run on RHEL 7 or CentOS 7, on physical hardware or a virtualized environment, and the authors recommend between 4 and 12 physical servers for a production deployment. That tells you the audience: someone planning a production estate, not a single test box. At 256 pages it is the shortest pick.

Treat the code as illustration. The chapter 6 Python samples request tokens from the Keystone /v2.0/ endpoint and read the Ceilometer API, and Queens removed both. They fail on every supported release, so port them to Keystone v3 and Gnocchi if you want them to run. The decision chapters hold up because their questions have not changed. Skip it if hands-on steps are what you need; managing projects, users and roles or anything else day to day is outside its scope. It was about $41 when we checked. Check the current price on Amazon.

Older OpenStack Books Still in Search Results

Several titles that appear for “openstack books” were left off the list. They are still listed on Amazon, but each has a newer pick above that covers the same ground or depends on removed tooling:

Title	Publisher, year	Why it is not a pick
OpenStack in Action	Manning, 2016	Printed in 2016, before the client and driver changes above
OpenStack Operations Guide	O’Reilly, 2014	Printed in 2014, three years before Pike, the oldest release in the table above
Mastering OpenStack, Second Edition	Packt, 2017	Replaced by the third edition
Preparing for the Certified OpenStack Administrator Exam	Packt, 2017	Written for an older COA; the Apress second edition is newer
Learning OpenStack Networking (Neutron), Second Edition	Packt, 2015	Replaced by the third edition
Common OpenStack Deployments	Pearson, 2016	Printed in 2016 and now out of print

Searches for free PDF or EPUB copies of these titles land here often. The upstream documentation is the free source that stays current, and the OpenStack client install guide covers the tool every pick now depends on.

Match the Book to How You Deploy

The deployment tool decides which book wastes the least of your time, because the tool is what aged fastest in every pick. Read the row that matches your cloud:

• Kolla-Ansible on 2026.1 or 2026.2: Mastering OpenStack, with Kolla-Ansible installed from the matching stable branch, the openstack_release: "master" line removed, and the Swift and Zun sections skipped.
• OpenStack-Ansible: the recipes in the Cookbook, but the current OpenStack-Ansible deployment guide instead of its chapter 1.
• DevStack or a training lab: the COA study guide for the exercises, and the Cookbook for extra recipes.
• OVN networking: Learning OpenStack Networking for the concepts, read beside the Neutron OVN documentation for the current packet path.
• Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift: the Red Hat documentation first, then OpenStack for Architects for the planning questions.

Whichever you buy, check the release it targets against the schedule before you run its code: 2026.1 Gazpacho is the SLURP release that skip-level upgrades land on, and every pick here predates it. If you want a working cloud first and a book second, our Kolla-Ansible deployment on Rocky Linux 10 gets a current release running. The Horizon branding guide then shows how to theme the dashboard once it is up.