provisioning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of supplying a group, ship, or expedition with food and other necessary supplies.

   The provisioning of the fleet was completed before it set sail.

   Careful provisioning ensured the troops had enough food for the entire campaign.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The installation of software on a system, especially when carried out automatically.

   Cloud platforms handle the provisioning of virtual machines in minutes.

   Automated provisioning lets developers deploy applications without installing anything by hand.

   Similardeployment, installation

   Note

   Computing borrowed the quartermaster's word for the step that turns a bare machine into a working one. Michael Peacock's Creating Development Environments with Vagrant (2015) places it after the system has booted. Shell scripts, configuration management systems or manual command-line entry can do the work. The verb behind it also covers people: you provision a user with an account and resources, just as you provision a server with software.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of provision.

   The quartermaster is provisioning the regiment for a six-month deployment.

   Provisioning the new servers automatically reduced setup time across the data center.

   Note

   A participle that nearly always takes an object, because both verbs behind it are transitive. You provision a regiment with food, or you provision a user with an account and a server with its software. As a gerund it can head a sentence (provisioning the servers took an hour). It then sits close to the noun for supplying. A determiner or an of-phrase (the provisioning of the fleet) marks the noun.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The act or practice of supplying food to wild animals.

   Researchers studied how the provisioning of monkeys affected their daily behavior.

   Regular provisioning of the seabirds gradually altered their migration patterns.

   Similarfeeding

   Note

   A researchers' word for what tourists simply call feeding the wildlife. Laëtitia Maréchal and her co-authors (2016) use it for the handouts that let visitors watch animals up close. They note that such provisioning can improve the animals' survival and reproductive success. It suits writing on wildlife behavior and management. In everyday talk, feeding the monkeys is the natural phrase. It usually takes an of-phrase naming the animals.

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