What aspect characterizes a deployment that uses customer-hosted Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

The characteristic that defines a deployment using customer-hosted Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the manual provisioning of Mule runtimes. In this deployment model, organizations have the control and responsibility to manage their infrastructure, which includes provisioning, configuring, and maintaining the Mule runtimes. This manual process contrasts with fully managed cloud services that often automate these tasks, allowing developers to focus more on application development rather than infrastructure management.

In customer-hosted environments, teams typically engage in manual provisioning to ensure the systems meet their specific requirements regarding compliance, security, and performance. Consequently, understanding this aspect is crucial for organizations that prefer to maintain oversight of their deployment environments while leveraging platform capabilities.

Other options such as cloud-native microservices architecture, completely automatic scaling, and integrated analytics features have varying implications and may apply under certain circumstances, but they do not exclusively define the nature of a deployment in a customer-hosted scenario like manual provisioning does.