A system and method for associating a state with a distributed system and transitioning component states with recovery to reverse transitioning attempts includes defining a global state representing an overall provisioning state of a plurality of components involved in a system wherein a set of global states are employed as provisioning checkpoints. Individual software component methods are defined for transitioning from one state to another. Individual states are associated with a global state. A rollback method is defined by which a destination global state may be rolled back to a previous global state in an event of a failure.