---
title: File system providers
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io.md
  - https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io/file-system-providers/storage-path-mapping.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Xperience by Kentico uses **file system providers** to abstract the underlying file system of the hosting machine. Different providers allow you to access specific parts of the application's file system and redirect file storage to external locations (such as Azure Blob Storage or Amazon S3) without changing application code. All file I/O goes through the `CMS.IO` abstraction layer – see [Files API and CMS.IO](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io.md) for details.

To connect providers to the correct paths, Xperience uses [storage path mapping](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io/file-system-providers/storage-path-mapping.md) – a registry-based system that routes each application path to the appropriate provider based on your hosting environment.

The system supports the following providers:

- **File system storage** – the default provider for local disk storage. Used automatically when no external mapping is configured.
- **[Azure Blob storage](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io/file-system-providers/azure-blob-storage.md)** – maps file system paths to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. Used for [SaaS](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/deployment/deploy-to-the-saas-environment.md) and [private cloud](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/deployment/deploy-to-private-cloud.md) deployments on Azure.
- **[Amazon S3](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io/file-system-providers/amazon-s3.md)** – maps file system paths to Amazon S3 storage.
- **[Custom file system providers](https://docs.kentico.com/documentation/developers-and-admins/api/files-api-and-cms-io/file-system-providers/custom-file-system-providers.md)** – implement your own provider for any storage backend.