Within this context, provisioning is the process of setting up a virtual machine so that it can be used for a specific purpose or project. Typically, this involves installing software, configuring the software, managing services running on the machine, and even setting up users and groups on the machine.

For a web-based software project, provisioning will likely entail the installation of a web server, a programming language, and a database system. Configuration changes will be needed to set up a database on the database system and to allow the web server to write to specific folders (to deal with user uploads).

Without this provisioning process, we would have an almost vanilla install of an operating system, which contains a synced copy of our project folder; this vanilla install wouldn't be usable as a development environment for our project. Provisioning takes us to the next level and gives us a fully working environment for our project.