Every time I see anything about OpenStack, it starts by listing all the companies that are backing it, and nary an example of how to start using it and what it does.

Compare that to, say, AWS, which when I first heard of it, I saw example of their cli commands starting and stopping VMs.

Maybe all this is meant to be marketing material for some other beast than me, the lowly developer.

I run http://sysadmincasts.com and I am about to do an "Into to AWS" and an "Into to OpenStack" series. These will address the very issue you describe, because I 100% agree with you, there is next to zero screencasts about what you can actually do with OpenStack (there are many, "here's how to install OpenStack" posts, but, what about once you have it installed?!), I also feel the same about AWS, in that, there seems to be a need for specific howtos which are easily consumable.

Email me (see my profile), and I'll send you a note when I have a couple episodes about OpenStack/AWS.

ps. if anyone has some specific topics they would like me to cover, please let me know!

I want to look at giving every student at our school a VPS and I think something like openstack is the way to do it, I'll be hotly anticipating said casts.

I have no idea what I need yet.

I guess depending on the hardware and software that you have/require. Google's Ganeti [1] is pretty easy to get going, and it is based on Linux Xen or KVM. There is a hands on tutorial @ http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18544

If you have hardware -- Ganeti basically allows you to create a Xen cluster of X nodes, create VMs, move them around the cluster (live migration if using DRBD), etc. I have several clusters with ~100 VMs and it has been rock solid. Ganeti is much better than trying to roll you own solution, and with live migration, it makes a nice alternative to VMware, just without the fancy GUI.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/

At Bloomberg, we've open-sourced our Chef recipes used to build our OpenStack environment. I'm guessing concrete examples like this are what you're looking for.

https://github.com/bloomberg/chef-bcpc

Solum is still in the design phase. Read more about it's vision and development model here. http://www.rackspace.com/blog/solum-open-development-from-da...

This is infact a great opportunity for developers, like you, to get involved right from the start.

Or maybe it's to persuade you to give OpenStack a try. "If it's good enough for <LARGE ORGANIZATION>, it's good enough for me."