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Coming from a seasoned (5year+) sysadmin with strong network knowledge, please don't expect a $105k salary within 2 years. Not being an ass, just being realistic (I am in Sydney, Australia on a roster of 40hours/week which usually does exceed 40hrs/w, but less than 50hrs/w. The salaries are slightly higher due to the cost of living here being stupid).

I work with CentOS on a day to day basis, and have been using OpenStack for well over a year now. I originally "learned the ropes" by doing the RedHat training and Certification for OpenStack on IceHouse.

Since then, I now use OpenStack with Kolla backed with Docker (containerised OpenStack). For those wondering what Kolla is, it uses Ansible playbooks with Jinja2 templates along with Docker.

Just a bit of background knowledge from my perspective.. Our implementation started with 6 utility style servers (ie. nova, neutron, glance, cinder, ceilometer nodes with redundancy), and 3 Ceph + nova-compute "beefy" nodes.

It's very specific to our company, thus requiring custom modifications based upon sable release of the current non-development release of OpenStack ("Kilo"). It's not recommend doing this as you are venturing away from standard, this was also highlighted by several speakers at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo last year.

Being attracted to OpenSource has it's pro's and con's. You as a person, think it's great. But as a company, it's generally harder to get across the line due to the following (see this as an example):

• Learning curve on company dime (flip side is the long term savings due to it OpenSource).
  
• Product support in the time of crisis (potentially longer resolution times).
  
• "Fresh blood" requiring training (on the flip side, someone with knowledge generally comes at a greater cost).
  
  The list can go on. :)
  
  Anyway, I can safely say that you need strong Linux and Networking skills to understand a lot of the concepts that OpenStack has (As an example, have you heard of Network namespaces before? Heard of VXLAN? Heard of OpenvSwitch? Do you know what tcpdump or tshark is? Heard of LACP?).
  
  I very much agree with a lot of the other comments in regarding to focusing on your Linux skills before even attempting to tackle OpenStack.
  
  I would say an ideal method to build up your skills is to go through the support channels and work your way up.
  
  You gain very valuable knowledge from the perspective of "feeling the pain of the customer" in the scenario of an outage. It'll help you one day to put away the cowboy hat, and double check your work or write an additional if statement in a bash script. :)
  
  Passion should give you drive. You don't attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without knowing how to walk up a hill first. 5 years+ in the job, and I still study new things (heck, even old things to sharpen the skills - waiting on this to arrive: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071841962 ).
  
  Sorry for the wall of text, I just hope it helps. Feel free to contact me if you wanted some direction~

I would highly encourage go to IRC #openstack-ansible and ask question. Yes documentation is big challenge everywhere.

There is a very nice book based on openstack-ansible deployment and very nice details about deployment plan: https://www.amazon.com/OpenStack-Cloud-Computing-Cookbook-networking/dp/1788398769/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_3?keywords=james+denton+openstack&qid=1557238867&s=gateway&sr=8-3-fkmrnull

Took me a moment to realize that you never said it was a book by Amar Kapadia.

So you don't get trapped in the terrible, terrible mobile amazon page thats listed; http://www.amazon.com/OpenStack-Cloud-Computing-Cookbook-Edition/dp/1782167587/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1382113491&sr=8-2&keywords=openstack+cookbook