The present invention is directed to provisioning and managing computing services in a computing utility system. It receives as an input an infrastructure independent description of a set of requirements on the new desired state of a computing service. It uses a knowledge plane to represent the infrastructure. The method generates a Concrete Model that describes a resource structure that refines the input and is implementable over the infrastructure. It then generates and possibly executes provisioning actions to create an identical resource structure on the infrastructure. The method can be used to create new computing services, to destroy existing computing services, to modify the resource combinations allocated to a computing service, or the configuration of these resources. Provisioning actions can be executed immediately, or saved and executed later, and possibly many times. Provisioning actions may be regenerated using the method whenever infrastructure characteristics, or the service requirements change.