# Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage in Flashback is the object-storage layer of the **Cloud and AI Gateway**. It lets you connect buckets/containers from multiple providers behind one operational model, so storage resources can be consumed consistently by repositories, automation, and AI/LLM workflows.

At a high level:

* A **Bucket** in Flashback is the representation of a remote vendor’s object storage resource.
* Depending on the provider, this resource can be called a **bucket** (S3, GCS) or a **container** (Azure Blob).
* Flashback standardizes access to those resources while preserving provider-specific connectivity and identity options.

## What Flashback supports for buckets and object storage

Flashback supports object storage resources exposed through:

* **AWS S3** endpoints.
* **S3-compatible** APIs from external or on-prem providers through custom endpoints.
* **Google Cloud Storage (GCS)** endpoints.
* **GCS-compatible** APIs from external or on-prem providers through custom endpoints.
* **Microsoft Azure Blob** storage accounts and containers.

This allows you to build multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem storage topologies where repositories can target heterogeneous storage backends from a single gateway layer.

## Buckets, containers, and object storage fundamentals

Object storage is designed around:

* **Objects** (data + metadata),
* grouped in **buckets/containers**,
* addressed through HTTP APIs,
* and controlled through API credentials or delegated identities.

In Flashback, this is especially useful when your storage resources are used alongside AI/LLM patterns (for example: grounding data, archived corpora, binary artifacts, logs, and generated outputs), because you can connect storage providers with consistent governance and repository-level operations.

## Configure bucket resources

For exact creation fields, provider-specific parameters, access mechanisms, storage-type constraints, and warnings, use the detailed guide:

* [Configure a Bucket](/guides/setup-the-cloud-and-ai-gateway/start-with-cloud-storage/create-a-bucket.md)

You can also configure buckets via API:

* [Bucket Management API](/support-reference/platform-api-reference/storage-apis/bucket-management.md)

## Security and secret encryption

Secret encryption is a platform-wide security principle in Flashback, not only a Cloud Storage behavior.

For the full model (how secrets are encrypted, when decryption happens, and why this applies to buckets, AI providers, and other connected resources), see:

* [Security and Secret Encryption](/support-reference/security-and-secret-encryption.md)


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