# Cloud Foundation Fabric and Cloud Foundation Toolkit This page highlights the main differences (both technical and philosophical) between Cloud Foundation Fabric and Cloud Foundation Toolkit for end users, to guide them in their decision making process for identifying the best suite of modules for their use cases. ## Cloud Foundation Fabric (a.k.a Fabric, this repo) Fabric is a collection of Terraform modules and end to end examples meant to be cloned as a single unit and used as is for fast prototyping or decomposed and modified for usage in organizations. ## Cloud Foundation Toolkit (a.k.a CFT) CFT is a collection of Terraform modules and examples with opinionated GCP best practices implemented as individual modules for gradual adoption and off the shelf usage in organizations. ## Key Differences
Fabric | CFT | |
Target User | Organizations interested in forking, maintaining and customizing Terraform modules. | Organizations interested in using opinionated, prebuilt Terraform modules. |
Configuration | Less opinionated allowing end users higher flexibility. | Opinionated by default, end users may need to fork if it does not meet their use case. |
Extensibility | Built with extensibility in mind catering to fork and use patterns. Modules are often lightweight and easy to adopt / tailor to specific use cases. | Not built with fork and use extensibility catering primarily to off the shelf consumption. Modules are tailored towards common usecases and extensible via composition. |
Config customization | Prefer customization using variables via objects, tight variable space. | Prefer customization using variables via primitives. |
Examples | Thorough examples for individual modules, and end to end examples composing multiple modules covering a wide variety of use cases from foundations to solutions. | Examples for a module mostly focus on that individual module. Composition is often not shown in examples but in larger modules built using smaller modules. |
Resources | Leaner modules wrapping resources. | Heavier root modules that often compose leaner sub modules wrapping resources. |
Resource grouping | Generally grouped by logical entities. | Generally grouped by products/product areas. |
Release Cadence | Modules versioned and released together. | Modules versioned and released individually. |
Individual module usage | Individual modules consumed directly using Git as a module source.
For production usage, customers are encouraged to “fork and own” their own repository. |
Individual repositories consumed via the Terraform registry.
For production/airgapped usage, customers may also mirror modules to a private registry. |
Factories | Fabric implements several "factories" in modules, where users can drive or automate Terraform via YAML files (projects, subnetworks, firewalls, etc.). | CFT does not implement factories and generally show examples usable with variable definitions files (.tfvars). |
Organizational adoption | Mono repo cloned into an organizational VCS (or catalog) and separated into individual modules for internal consumption. | Individual repos forked (for air gap) or wrapping upstream sources to create individual modules for internal consumption. |
Distribution | Distributed via Git/GitHub. | Distributed via Git/GitHub and Terraform Registry. |
Testing | Every PR performs unit tests on modules, examples, and documentation snippets by evaluating a Terraform plan via Python tftest library. | Every PR performs full end-to-end deployment with integration tests using the blueprint test framework. |