In a hosted environment an application will not have the full freedom of choosing it’s runtime behavior and the way it is being provisioned. There are many policies defined in a hosted environment that need to be enforced from the service provider. Therefore I see the merge of the two manifests as a design-time step. It can be used to actually generate

·         a set of abstract provisioning tasks

·         the provisioning script(s)

·         the provisioning workflow

This output needs to be inspected and tested in the hosted environment and will then be approved and enabled.
Parallel to generating the provisioning tasks there are a more steps which need to be accomplished:

·         create a product in the product catalog

·         associate pricing and billing information

·         associate service plans

·         define monitoring and tie it together with service plans and billing

In the PoC there is a basic notion of a product catalog as there was a web application built to demonstrate this. IMHO the Design-time is a very crucial step for the service provider. There are a lot of decisions which need to be made. With this diagram I want to raise the awareness that there are a lot of steps at design-time vs. run-time. Someone can argue the the granularity in the diagram between design steps and runtime step are not 100% identical and I would agree with that. The purpose is actually to show that from a hosters perspective there’s a lot of things to do before run-time starts.