16. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having instructions stored thereon, the instructions, when executed by one or more processors, cause the processors to perform operations comprising: receiving a configuration specification for configuring a cloud-based deployment, the configuration specification being written in specification language and requiring instantiation of respective class definitions of one or more classes, each class modeling a respective data or functional component of the cloud-based deployment using a group of, configurable class parameters, and the respective class definition of each class representing a requested state of the data or functional component modeled by the class; deriving a plurality of application programming interface (API) calls for configuring the cloud-based deployment based on the class definitions of the one or more classes; causing the plurality of API calls to be executed to configure the cloud-based deployment; storing respective class definitions of a plurality of core classes of the specification language, each core class corresponding to a modular component of a cloud-based environment, each core class being extendable with additional class parameters to configure the respective modular component; storing a mapping between each of the core classes and a respective group of API calls, the respective group of API calls for configuring the modular component associated with the core class according to the class parameters of the core class; and storing a plurality of protocols for modifying the respective groups of API calls associated with each core class to obtain a new group of API calls for a new class definition derived from the core class.
19. The computer-readable medium of claim 16 , wherein: the objet ed-specification language supports dependency between class definitions, and a definition dependency between a first class and a second class represents a deployment dependency between respective components modeled by the first and the second class.