What is the Synapse Agent ?

Synapse enables you to remotely manage a large number of hosts. It brings together features of Configuration Management and Orchestration in a lightweight framework. Written in Python and using AMQP for messaging between the nodes.

Learn more !

View first screencast

What do you need ?

• A RabbitMQ server
• The synapse-agent on the hosts you want to manage
• The synapse-client to control them

Features

REST API

Manipulates resources (packages, files, services, ...) instead of executing commands. Describe a resource state and synapse takes care of it. For example, installing a package means sending this kind of message to synapse:

{
    "collection": "packages",
    "action": "update",
    "id": "htop",
    "attributes": {
        "installed": true
    }
}

Of course, you can use the synapse-client to make it easy:

synapse-client packages install htop

OS Abstraction

Abstract the definition of resources so you can focus on the what, not the how.

The example above about how to install a package works independently of the underlying platform.

Pluggable engine

Manage any kind of resources on the remote hosts with custom plugins. Available built-in resources are:

• files
• packages
• services
• users
• groups

Why not building a "cron" plugin.

How ? Take a look at the existing packages-plugin and start your own ?

Lightweight

Easy to deploy, small memory footprint. Look at the Quick Start Guide

Secure

No incoming open port required (not even port 22/ssh), secured with PKI/SSL

Fast

Parallelize tasks accross all your hosts.

Synapse-agents are automatically bound to an AMQP fanout exchange. It means that if a single message is published into that exchange, the RabbitMQ server broadcasts this message to every synapse-agent bound to that exchange.

Flexible

Reach nodes without knowing their ip or hostname, filter requests by hostname, ip, platform Want to reach only hosts in particular subdomains ?

synapse-client services syslog-ng restart --filter_hosts *.guardis.be