jargon

Platform & DevOps·The orchestrator's model of the world

you ran the commands in order, and doing it again would create a second copy of everything.

Imperative configuration

Also calledimperative, procedural configuration, runbook scripting

Specifying the steps rather than the outcome — create this, scale that, delete the other. It is direct, obvious and perfect for a one-off; it becomes a liability the moment the same script needs to run against a system that is already partly in the target state. The practical middle ground most teams land on is imperative commands for investigation and declarative files for anything that must survive a person leaving.

Commonly confused with