As quoted by Apple:
A provisioning profile is a collection of digital entities that uniquely ties developers and devices to an authorized iPhone Development Team and enables a device to be used for testing.
A provisioning profile is an entity created from iTunesConnect for a particular certificate. It ties the Team ID to the devices on which the profile is installed to use all features eg. creating development builds for particular devices that were mapped with the Profile or create ad-hoc builds.
Each Development Provisioning Profile will contains: