.. _plankton: Image Registry Service ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Introduction ============ The Image Registry Service is a part of Cyclades. It is implemented as a very thin layer on top of Pithos; every Image on the Image Service is a file on Pithos, with special metadata which are stored on Cyclades. At the frontend, Cyclades implement the OpenStack Glance API; at the backend it queries an existing Pithos backend. In the current implementation the service runs the Image Service and Pithos on a single, unified backend: users may synchronize their Images, using the Pithos clients, then register them with Cyclades, with zero data movement. Then spawn new VMs from those Images with Cyclades. Let's see below: .. image:: images/synnefo-clonepath.png The figure shows a sailor bundling his physical machine with the ``snf-image-creator`` tool, uploading the file to Pithos, registering the file as a new Image, and then spawning two new VMs with Cyclades from this Image. The :ref:`Image API ` is implemented inside Cyclades, so please consult the :ref:`Cyclades Documentation ` for more details.