我找的一段话,试着理解一下:

Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack are all 
configuration management tools, which means they are designed to install and manage software on existing servers. CloudFormation and Terraform are provisioning tools, which means they are designed to provision the servers themselves (as well as the rest of your infrastructure, like load balancers, databases, networking configuration, etc), leaving the job of configuring those servers to other tools. These two categories are not mutually exclusive, as most configuration management tools can do some degree of provisioning and most provisioning tools can do some degree of configuration management. But the focus on configuration management or provisioning means that some of the tools are going to be a better fit for certain types of tasks.

可以理解为初始化,但貌似无直接中译名。

Ref: 
https://blog.gruntwork.io/why-we-use-terraform-and-not-chef-puppet-ansible-saltstack-or-cloudformation-7989dad2865c
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Yours sincerely,
Christopher Meng