gcloud, Terraform, Config Connector, Helm, Fabric FAST.

Each occupies a genuinely different layer.

gcloudImperative, one-off, scripting

TerraformDeclarative, reviewable, apply-once

Config ConnectorContinuous reconciliation via K8s CRDs

HelmPackages what runs inside the cluster

Fabric FASTStaged, whole-org bootstrap from scratch

Fabric FAST is the name to know for the exam — Google's own Professional Services engineers' staged Terraform framework, the direct successor to the Cloud Foundation Toolkit.

Never let Terraform and Config Connector both claim the same resource — two reconcilers fighting over one resource is a real production incident, not a theoretical risk.