provisionsdepends

Provisionsdepends is a term used to describe the explicit declaration of dependencies between provisioning actions within infrastructure provisioning and configuration management systems. It denotes that the execution of a given provisioning step is conditioned on the successful completion of one or more other steps. The concept is commonly implemented as a dependency graph, with nodes representing provisions (such as resource creation, configuration changes, or deployment tasks) and directed edges indicating a depends-on relationship.

Benefits include ordered execution, improved reproducibility, and safer parallelism. By codifying dependencies, systems can avoid race conditions, ensure that prerequisites are satisfied, and provide clearer rollout semantics. Most implementations also include rules to detect and report cycles, which would indicate inconsistent provisioning plans. Dynamic environments may support updating the dependency graph at run time, with appropriate handling for in-flight provisions.

Provisionsdepends overlaps with and is implemented by several technologies in practice. Some infrastructure as code tools expose a depends_on mechanism to enforce ordering, while workflow orchestrators model tasks and their dependencies similarly. It is related to broader concepts such as dependency graphs, orchestration, and deployment planning. When used well, it helps teams maintain predictable deployment outcomes and easier rollback.

See also: dependency graph, infrastructure as code, provisioning, orchestration, deployment pipeline.