Savanna could be integrated with 3rd party management tools like Apache Ambari and Cloudera Management Console. The integration is achieved using plugin mechanism.
In short, responsibilities are divided between Savanna core and plugin as follows. Savanna interacts with user and provisions infrastructure (VMs). Plugin installs and configures Hadoop cluster on the VMs. Optionally Plugin could deploy management and monitoring tools for the cluster. Savanna provides plugin with utility methods to work with VMs.
A plugin must extend savanna.plugins.provisioning:ProvisioningPluginBase class and implement all the required methods. Read Plugin SPI for details.
The instance objects provided by Savanna have remote property which could be used to work with VM. The remote is a context manager so you can use it in with instance.remote: statements. The list of available commands could be found in savanna.utils.remote.InstanceInteropHelper. See Vanilla plugin source for usage examples.