Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST: forked, never left unmodified
Google's own staged Terraform blueprints are a starting point to adapt, not a black box dependency.
Speaker notes
- Cloud Foundation Toolkit is a library of individually reusable Terraform modules; Fabric FAST is a complete, opinionated multi-stage pipeline from Google's own Professional Services org, organizing bootstrap into staged root modules with defined handoff contracts.
- Walk the stage flow: bootstrap (Terraform service accounts, state bucket) feeds resource management (folders, projects, org policy), which feeds both networking and security in parallel, which both feed the project factory stage that creates per-team application projects.
- Emphasize the caution directly: neither tool encodes YOUR organization's specific naming or policy needs — Meridian forked CFT's project-factory module as a starting point but changed its labeling scheme to match their own convention. Fork and adapt, never depend on unmodified.
Deck map
01
One pipeline, built deliberately
02
PCDE sections 1-2, and where this course sits in the track
03
ACE operates a resource; PCDE designs the system
04
One tooling project, not one pipeline per environment
05
Dev, staging, and prod should never share one policy
06
What actually crosses the project boundary: a token, never a key
07
A hand-run command leaves no record of why
08
Local Terraform state is a production incident waiting to happen
09
Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST: forked, never left unmodified
10
Terraform for foundations, Config Connector for workload-coupled infra
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Git decides, automation reconciles — no human runs apply
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Cloud Build's whole job: source in, tested artifact out
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Built-in substitutions are automatic; user-defined ones need an underscore
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An unfiltered branch trigger is a budget incident waiting to happen
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Three repository modes, and scanning stops at the virtual layer
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Cheap checks first, expensive checks last
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Cloud Build produces; Cloud Deploy promotes — never the reverse
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Four objects: DeliveryPipeline, Target, Release, Rollout
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Canary limits exposure; blue/green makes the cutover atomic
20
A human gates production; automation gates everything else
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Meridian's full path: merge to production, one continuous record
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Credentials go in Secret Manager; configuration goes in Parameter Manager
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An ENV baked into a Dockerfile is still build-time injection
24
One question resolves almost every config-placement decision
25
Ephemeral environments need a TTL, or they're not actually ephemeral
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Rapid, Regular, Stable — and a maintenance exclusion set too late doesn't help
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A compromised pipeline is every environment it deploys to
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SLSA grades the pipeline's trustworthiness, not any single artifact
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Default-deny, or an unlisted cluster accepts anything
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Only /home survives a session — everything else is rebuilt fresh
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Every chapter of this course, in one sequence
32
Readiness checklist