Provisioning means starting new hosts (be it physical or virtual) and configuring them in a way that allows them to run Cluster Management Tools. After provisioning, the host is ready to become a node inside the cluster and can receive work.

This may involve using Infrastructure Management tools like Terraform to spin up new hosts, and Configuration Management tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Salt, to ensure the configuration set inside each host are consistent with each other.

While provisioning can be done before deploying our application, most Cluster Management software has a provisioning component built into it.