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Managing Silos

A silo is a storage space that is the same regardless of platform used. Even though a silo may appear as a directory in your cloud storage, it is highly recommended that a silo should only be managed by the command line tool.

OpenFlight Silo

The Flight Silo tool comes with the openflight silo, this is a read-only silo that provides some example files & software. So long as the AWS platform is prepared then the openflight repository can be interacted with to pull files and software.

Viewing Silos

To see the available silos on the system use the command flight silo repo list. 

[flight@chead1 ~]$ flight silo repo list
┌────────────┬───────────────────────────────────┬──────────┬─────────┬────────────┐
│ Name       │ Description                       │ Platform │ Public? │ ID         │
├────────────┼───────────────────────────────────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ mysilo1    │                                   │ aws      │ false   │ ABCDE123   │
│ openflight │ Openflight software and resources │ aws      │ true    │ OPENFLIGHT │
└────────────┴───────────────────────────────────┴──────────┴─────────┴────────────┘

Note

Silos that are defined locally and no longer exist upstream will be marked in yellow. This can occur when a silo has been deleted from a different system.

Creating and Adding Silos

To create a silo use the command flight silo repo create. This will take you through a series of questions:

  • Provider type - Which provider the silo should be created on.
  • Silo name - What the name of the silo should be.

After this point, any further questions depend on the chosen platform.

  • Region - The region the silo should be created in.
  • Access key ID - The ID for a valid aws access key.
  • Secret access key - The secret key for a valid aws access key.

More information about AWS access keys can be found in the AWS documentation.

  • Endpoint URL - The URL of the OpenStack Swift Storage service to store this silo
  • Access key ID - The ID for a valid access key generated by OpenStack EC2-like credentials
  • Secret access key - The secret key for the above access key

You can add an already existing silo with the command flight silo repo add. All questions asked will be the same as for creation, except that the answers will be used to find an existing silo.

Removing and Deleting Silos

If you no longer wish to have access to a silo on your machine, you can run the command flight silo repo remove <name>. This means that in order to access the silo again you would need to use the add command.

A silo can be deleted with flight silo repo delete <name>. Unlike the remove command, the silo could not be re-added later as it is fully deleted upstream along with all of its contents.

Setting a default silo

If a default silo has been set, then commands that require a silo to be specified in the argument will use the default instead. Set a default with the command flight silo set-default e.g. 

[flight@chead1 ~]$ flight silo set-default openflight
Default silo set to: openflight

Editing Silo Information

When a silo is created it is named and the description is left blank. Both the name and description can be modified using the flight silo repo edit command. For example: 

[flight@chead1 ~]$ flight silo repo edit mysilo1
Silo name: myfilesilo1
Silo description: This is my silo for sharing files between ephemeral cloud systems!
Updating silo details...
Silo details updated

Note

Any other systems that have a silo added locally will detect upstream changes and will require flight silo repo refresh to be run to ensure names and descriptions are synchronised with the upstream silo.