Trystack.org is a free, public OpenStack sandbox for developers and ordinary people to try out OpenStack or test their apps.  It’s been around since 2012 but has recently been revamped by Kambiz Aghaiepour, Dan Radez and myself.  Sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, it runs on RDO Kilo OpenStack on new hardware in a sweet new datacenter.

How to Get Started
Right now only Facebook Horizon authentication is supported but we’re working on getting API key generation back in place.  We’re also investigating alternate Horizon authentication via OpenStackID in addition to Facebook.  Here’s how to get started:

• Join the Facebook group
• Once approved, login and get to stacking.
• Questions? Find us on #trystack on irc.freenode.net or Facebook.

Trystack Superuser has a nice interview about it here.
Rich Bowen has made a nice video showing how to get setup below:

Testing Purposes Only
Because of the demand for resources, instances and networks are automatically removed after a certain amount of time.  Your account will never be deleted unless you are unruly and inconsiderate to your neighbors.

• 24 hours after creation, instances deleted
• 12 hours after allocation, floating IP addresses released
• 12 hours after being set, router gateways cleared

Monitoring and Health
As part of the upgrades and move to a new datacenter and hardware, we’ve added some advanced Nagios checks in place.  Besides basic host/service level checks we also do some advanced checks against floating IP addresses, spinning up testing instances testing both SSH and ICMP.  Code for this is located here.

Infrastructure Design and Hardware
We’ll be expanding new hardware and switching gear soon, here’s what is running currently:

• 12 x Dell PowerEdge C6105 Servers
  • AMD Opteron 4376 HE (8core-16VCPU)
  • 96G Memory
• Juniper EX4300 Switching
• Netapp FAS2552 (Ontap C-Mode 8.2.2RC1)
• RHEL 7.1 running RDO Kilo
• /24 Public IP network (248 floating IPs)

What’s Coming
API access is now fixed on Kilo.  We’re also investigating OpenStackID support via OpenID Connect (OAuth2).

We’ll be expanding the hardware and switching environment also, stay tuned!
Big thanks to the OpenStack Foundation, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat, and Netapp for their donations of hardware, time and expertise as we continue to grow the environment and community.

Update:
Nicole Martinelli from OpenStack Superuser has written a blog post about the Trystack improvements and upgrades, check it out.