jargon

Platform & DevOps·Infrastructure described in a file

you ran the whole thing again after a network error and it created nothing new, because everything it wanted already existed.

Idempotent provisioning

Also calledidempotent apply, safe re-run

The property that applying a configuration repeatedly converges on the same result rather than accumulating duplicates or errors. It is what makes automation safe to retry, and it is the practical reason declarative tooling won over scripts. It is also easy to break by hand, with a provisioner step that appends to a file or generates a random name on every run.

Commonly confused with