Meaning
Provisioning activities involve the setup and configuration of the physical or virtual resources required to host an application or service. Successful infrastructure deployment results in a ready environment that meets the specified compute, storage and network requirements. This process marks the transition from design to an operational state where software can be installed.
It includes the mounting of hardware in racks or the instantiation of virtual instances in a cloud provider.
Environment Setup
Consistency between the development and production environments is a primary goal of the deployment process. Manual steps are replaced with scripts to ensure that the configuration is identical every time. This reduces the likelihood of errors caused by missing dependencies or incorrect firewall settings.
Provisioning Logic
Automated tools handle the allocation of resources based on predefined templates. When the infrastructure deployment is triggered, the system requests the necessary capacity from the underlying hardware layer. The logic ensures that the resources are allocated in the correct order to satisfy all inter-dependencies.
Operational Baseline
Measuring the success of the deployment involves checking the new resources against the performance requirements. A pilot run might show that the network throughput is lower than expected, requiring a change in the configuration before production begins. The cost of calling the deployment finished early is the potential for system failure when the real workload is applied.