Provisioning meaning

Question

Provisioning is the process of setting up IT infrastructure. It can also refer to the steps required to manage access to data and resources, and make them available to users and systems.

Provisioning is not the same thing as configuration, but they are both steps in the deployment process. Once something has been provisioned, the next step is configuration.

I find the following lines confusing

"It can also refer to the steps required to manage access to data and resources, and make them available to users and systems."

"Provisioning is not the same thing as configuration, but they are both steps in the deployment process"

How can you make your resources available to the user without setting them up and configuring them. So why isn't configuration a part of provisioning?

Also what exactly do you mean by setting up the resources?

Answer 1

As per my understanding on cloud native infra.

Provisioning involves creating resources like VMs/instances, setting up IAM roles and policies, Firewalls, DBs, Load balancers, any clusters like EKS, GKE, etc.

And, configuration part involves, preparing your instances to run actually your apps by installing necessary softwares and packages, setting up tables in DBs and populating data, RBAC controls on resources, etc.

Answer 2

The term is used in different ways by different people and in different contexts. I like to think of each layer of 'the whole thing' as being provisioned individually, so I provision machine or container images by installing software on them using docker or packer, then I provision the infrastructure using terraform, and finally, I provision my application using kubectl or helm. Though, this is only a working model as these layers and tools tend to blend together at the edges.