Five infrastructure tools, five different jobs

Speaker notes

• Terraform remains the dominant, reviewable, versioned IaC choice for most infrastructure, using a remote GCS backend with locking so concurrent applies can't corrupt shared state. Config Connector manages GCP resources as Kubernetes Custom Resources with continuous reconciliation, the key difference from Terraform's apply-once-and-stop model, never let both claim the same resource at once.
• Fabric FAST is the name to know for the exam, a staged, opinionated Terraform framework from Google's own Professional Services engineers for bootstrapping an entire production-ready organization from scratch, the direct successor to what was previously called the Cloud Foundation Toolkit.
• Helm sits one layer above the other four conceptually, packaging what runs inside a cluster once Terraform and Config Connector have provisioned the infrastructure it needs. A GKE cluster from Terraform, a Cloud SQL dependency from Config Connector, and a Helm-deployed application is a genuinely common three-tool production stack.

Deck map