With advance Cloud provisioning, the customer contracts with the provider for services and the provider prepares the appropriate resources in advance of start of service. The customer is charged a flat fee or is billed on a monthly basis.
With dynamic provisioning, the provider allocates more resources as they are needed and removes them when they are not. The customer is billed on a pay-per-use basis. When dynamic provisioning is used to create a hybrid cloud, it is sometimes referred to as cloud bursting.
With user self-provisioning (also known as cloud self-service), the customer purchases resources from the cloud provider through a web form, creating a customer account and paying for resources with a credit card. The provider’s resources are available for customer use within hours, if not minutes.