Providers and Regions

Providers and regions model the cloud infrastructure that hosts your block stores, metadata stores, and proxy groups. They are reference data that you define once and then associate with storage and compute resources.

Providers

A provider represents a cloud platform or infrastructure operator.

Provider Fields

Field	Type	Description
`code`	string	Short identifier (primary key), e.g., `aws`, `gcp`, `azure`, `oci`
`name`	string	Human-readable display name

Common Providers

Code	Name
`aws`	Amazon Web Services
`gcp`	Google Cloud Platform
`azure`	Microsoft Azure
`oci`	Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

You can define custom providers for S3-compatible storage platforms:

configure.flexfs create provider --code minio --name MinIO
configure.flexfs create provider --code wasabi --name Wasabi
configure.flexfs create provider --code ceph --name "Ceph RGW"

Managing Providers

# Create
configure.flexfs create provider --code aws --name "Amazon Web Services"

# List
configure.flexfs list providers

# Show
configure.flexfs show provider aws

# Update
configure.flexfs update provider aws --name AWS

# Delete
configure.flexfs delete provider aws

Regions

A region represents a geographic deployment area within a provider. Regions are scoped to a provider — each region belongs to exactly one provider.

Region Fields

Field	Type	Description
`provider_code`	string	Parent provider code (composite primary key)
`code`	string	Region identifier (composite primary key), e.g., `us-east-1`
`name`	string	Human-readable display name

Common Regions

Provider	Code	Name
`aws`	`us-east-1`	US East (N. Virginia)
`aws`	`us-west-2`	US West (Oregon)
`aws`	`eu-west-1`	EU (Ireland)
`gcp`	`us-central1`	Iowa
`gcp`	`europe-west1`	Belgium
`azure`	`eastus`	East US
`azure`	`westeurope`	West Europe
`oci`	`us-ashburn-1`	US East (Ashburn)

Managing Regions

# Create
configure.flexfs create region \
  --providerCode aws --code us-east-1 --name "US East (N. Virginia)"

# List
configure.flexfs list regions

# List filtered by provider
configure.flexfs list regions --providerCode aws

# Show
configure.flexfs show region aws us-east-1

# Update
configure.flexfs update region aws us-east-1 --name "US East (Virginia)"

# Delete
configure.flexfs delete region aws us-east-1

Note that show, update, and delete for regions require two positional arguments: the provider code and the region code.

How Providers and Regions Relate to Other Resources

Providers and regions are referenced by:

Block stores — each block store is associated with a provider and region, indicating where the object storage bucket resides
Meta stores — each metadata store is associated with a provider and region, indicating where the metadata server is deployed
Proxy groups — each proxy group is associated with a provider and region, indicating where the proxy servers are deployed

This provider/region model enables flexFS to support multi-cloud and multi-region deployments. A single flexFS Enterprise deployment can have block stores in AWS S3, metadata servers in GCP, and proxy groups spanning both — all managed through the same admin server.

Block APIs

In addition to providers and regions, flexFS maintains a read-only lookup table of supported block APIs:

Code	Name
`s3`	Amazon S3 (and S3-compatible)
`gcs`	Google Cloud Storage
`azure`	Azure Blob Storage
`oci`	Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage

Block API codes are used when creating block stores to specify which storage protocol to use. The block API is independent of the provider — for example, you can use the s3 API with a minio or wasabi provider.

configure.flexfs list block-apis