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flexFS

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

Section titled “Providers”

A provider represents a cloud platform or infrastructure operator.

Provider Fields

Section titled “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

Section titled “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:

Terminal window
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

Section titled “Managing Providers”
Terminal window
# 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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “Managing Regions”
Terminal window
# 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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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.

Terminal window
configure.flexfs list block-apis