The scope for lifecycle management tasks is defined in a deliberately broad way, even though not all of the function will be there at once. It includes standard activities on an individual resource basis (e.g. starting and stopping of virtual machines), as well as custom activities (e.g. execution of a shell script). It also allows using state management tools like IBM's BigFix, or SCM tools like Chef or Puppet. Another aspect of lifecycle management is the ability to integrate with process flow and service management environments. Cloud-native workloads will handle a lot of their lifecycle management through DevOps toolchains, so that's another aspect.