A system is presented for provisioning resources on a target cloud platform based on a platform-independent specification of a data center. The system identifies data center entities represented within the platform-independent declarative specification and generates data structures and metadata representations of the data center entities. The system then generates instructions for provisioning services or deploying applications for creating one or more services on the target cloud platform based on the data structures and metadata representations of the data center entities according to the declarative specification. The system sends the generated instructions for execution on the target cloud computing platform, where the target cloud computing platform executes the instructions to generate the data center. The system provides users with access to the computing resources of the data center created by the cloud computing platform.