Cyclades is the Synnefo component that implements the Compute, Network, Image and Volume services. It exposes the associated OpenStack REST APIs: OpenStack Nova, Neutron, Glance and Cinder. Cyclades is the part which manages multiple Ganeti clusters at the backend. Cyclades issues commands to a Ganeti cluster using Ganeti’s Remote API (RAPI). The administrator can expand the infrastructure dynamically by adding new Ganeti clusters to reach datacenter or multi-datacenter scale. Cyclades knows nothing about low-level VM management operations, e.g., the handling of VM creations, migrations among physical nodes and node downtimes; the design and implementation of the end-user API is orthogonal to VM handling at the backend.
There are two distinct, asynchronous paths in the interaction between Synnefo and Ganeti. The effect path is activated in response to a user request; Cyclades issues VM control commands to Ganeti over RAPI. The update path is triggered whenever the state of a VM changes, due to Synnefo- or administrator-initiated actions happening at the Ganeti level. In the update path, we monitor Ganeti’s job queue to produce notifications to the rest of the Synnefo infrastructure over a message queue.
Users have full control over their VMs: they can create new ones, start them, shutdown, reboot, and destroy them. For the configuration of their VMs they can select number of CPUs, size of RAM and system disk, and operating system from pre-defined Images including popular Linux distros (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Gentoo, Archlinux, OpenSuse, Oracle Linux), MS-Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2, as well as BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).
The REST API for VM management, being OpenStack compatible, can interoperate with 3rd party tools and client libraries.
The Cyclades UI is written in Javascript/jQuery and runs entirely on the client side for maximum reponsiveness. It is just another API client; all UI operations happen with asynchronous calls over the API.
The networking functionality includes dual IPv4/IPv6 connectivity for each VM, easy, platform-provided firewalling either through an array of pre-configured firewall profiles, or through a roll-your-own firewall inside the VM. Users may create multiple private, virtual L2 networks, so that they construct arbitrary network topologie, e.g., to deploy VMs in multi-tier configurations. The networking functionality is exported all the way from the backend to the API and the UI.
Please also see the Admin Guide for more information and the Installation Guide for installation instructions on Debian Wheezy or CentOS 6.5.