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What would "provision a machine" mean, compared to "bootstrapping a machine"?

I see that provision is mostly used when talking about Puppet and Chef, and bootstrapping seams to be mentioned more closely to a machines booting process (really early after powering the machine on). However, some people seem to use these interchangeably.

Related:

3 Answers 3

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Bootstrap refers to as a thin kludge or hack deriving from the phrase: "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

Provisioning is more generic, and doesn't have the same context around difficulty or cleverness of the solution.

Example:

I bootstrapped the new VM with the puppet binary so that I could privision it from the puppet-master.

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  • I like the last summary, which I'd then rewrite as "You bootstrap something so you can do some work on it, and provision something means getting it ready handle some work (or getting it ready to do some work for you)". Would you agree with this? Dec 9, 2015 at 9:13
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I am sure someone can craft a better answer however to me bootstrapping is related to the boot process where the process that starts up on the cpu initially must start the rest of the OS.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1254542/what-is-bootstrapping

Provisioning implies assignment and potential utilization of resources. For instance, You provision VM's from the hardware resources available on the system or group of systems. You even hear the term over-provision in this context meaning you have allocated more potential resources than are currently available knowing that many of the provisions are under-utilized.

You can also provision files, settings, etc. in existing systems with a configuration management system such as puppet or chef.

I hope that helps. If something is unclear I would be happy to try for a better explanation of anything specific.

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Provisioning is the process of creating, installing, configuring, and delivering a machine or work environment. Tools such as Vagrant automate the provisioning of a virtual machine to make this a repeatable process requiring minimal effort.

Bootstrapping is the process of installing and configuring the work environment. Your bootstrap script can be provided as an argument to the provisioner.

See the following for details:

https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/provisioning.html https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/provisioning/basic_usage.html

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  • Please note how this answer (which is provision, then bootstrap) deviates from the two above (which are first bootstrap, then provision (where provision)). Jan 29, 2018 at 20:08

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