Technical overview - Fuga Cloud

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What is Fuga Cloud?

Fuga Cloud is a high-performance public cloud service, hosted in the Netherlands and powered by Cyso. Fuga Cloud is built on recent and stable OpenStack technology and uses enterprise grade hardware to deliver the best, most reliable and cost-friendly OpenStack platform of the Netherlands.

Build and host your own platforms and applications on our public cloud from compute, storage and networking components. Fuga Cloud offers a fast, flexible and highly scalable platform with extensive options for automation and orchestration. A full technical overview of the Fuga Cloud platform can be found below on this page.

Manage your Fuga Cloud platform whichever way you prefer. Either use the user-friendly Horizon web interface, the rich features of the command line interface or harness the full power of the different OpenStack APIs directly from your own application using a RESTful API.

Getting started with Fuga Cloud is easy: fill out your credentials and complete our easy sign-up process. Once you’ve completed the registration, just log onto the dashboard and create your first Fuga Cloud instance in minutes.


How does it work?

Fuga Cloud is an open source cloud computing platform. It includes a plethora of different projects, which interact and form the OpenStack ecosystem. The figure below shows the basic components that form the OpenStack ecosphere and how they interact. Together, they create a rich set of features and the possibility for massive scalability. Each service offers an application programming interface (API) which, combined, form a flexible and customizable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution.

OpenStack simplified

Figure 1: OpenStack architecture [source: OpenStack docs]

Core Services

  • DashboardHorizon

    Provides a web-based self-service portal to interact with underlying OpenStack services, such as launching an instance, assigning IP addresses and configuring access controls.

  • ComputeNova

    Manages the lifecycle of compute flavors (virtual hardware templates) and instances in your Fuga Cloud OpenStack environment. Responsibilities include spawning, scheduling and decommissioning of machines on demand. Floating IP addresses for instances are also provisioned through Nova.

  • NetworkingNeutron

    Enables network connectivity and load balancing as a service for other OpenStack services, such as OpenStack Compute. Provides an API for users to define internal and external networks.

Storage

  • Object StorageSwift

    Stores and retrieves arbitrary unstructured data objects via a RESTful, HTTP based API. It is highly fault tolerant with its data replication and scale out architecture. Swift also stores back-ups of images and volumes.

  • Block StorageCinder

    Provides persistent block storage to running instances, either on SSD or standard disks. It allows you to create and centrally manage storage devices known as Cinder volumes.

More on the available OpenStack storage types

Shared and advanced services

  • Identity Keystone

    Provides an authentication and authorization service for other OpenStack services, as well as a catalog of endpoints for all OpenStack services.

  • Image Service Glance

    Stores and retrieves virtual machine disk images with bootable operating systems installed on them. OpenStack Compute uses these during instance provisioning.

  • TelemetryCeilometer

    Monitors and meters the OpenStack cloud for billing, benchmarking, scalability, and statistical purposes.

  • Orchestration Heat

    Allows you to configure automated provisioning of your instances. This way you can launch multiple instances or complete clusters and network configurations based on templates.

How to use Fuga Cloud?

OpenStack is driven by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which can be accessed by several means. The most user-friendly interface is the Horizon dashboard. The most powerful and complete interface is interacting with the API directly from your own application.

Fuga flowchart

Figure 2: OpenStack APIs

  • Horizon Dashboard

    OpenStack’s user-friendly webinterface is called Horizon. You can use it to create your servers (instances), storage and networks. Besides these basic functionality, it also has many more features to manage platforms and configurations.

    More on Getting started with OpenStack

  • Command Line Interface

    You can use the native OpenStack Command-Line Interface (CLI) tools to interact with your Fuga Cloud environment. For each API, there is a separate CLI tool with its own set of commands.

    Read our tutorial on Getting started with the Fuga CLI

  • Your RESTful application

    Use the OpenStack APIs and extensions to launch server instances, create images, assign metadata to instances and images. You can also create containers and objects and complete other actions in your OpenStack cloud.

Services currently under development

We’re continuously testing and implementing more OpenStack projects into the Fuga Cloud platform.
The following services are currently under development and evaluation:

Check our stories in our labs

  • Database as a Service Trove

    Trove provides a scalable and reliable Cloud Database as a Service provisioning functionality, for both relational and non-relational database engines.

  • Big Data ClustersSahara

    The Sahara project provides users with simple means to provision data processing frameworks (such as Hadoop, Spark and Storm) on OpenStack.

  • DNS as a Service Designate

    Designate provides a multi-tenant DNS as a Service functionality for OpenStack with a RESTful API for domain & record management.

  • Container ServicesMagnum

    Magnum is an OpenStack project that makes container orchestration engines such as Docker and Kubernetes available as first class resources in OpenStack.

  • Bare Metal ProvisioningIronic

    Ironic is an integrated OpenStack program, which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines through an API and a set of plugins.