3.4. Planning and Implementing Resources Using Tooling

💡 First Principle: Manually clicking through the console to provision infrastructure doesn't scale past a handful of resources, and doesn't leave behind a reviewable, repeatable record of what was built — which is exactly the gap Infrastructure as Code and AI-assisted tooling both close, from two different directions.

⚠️ Common Misconception: Terraform is a Google-built, Google-exclusive infrastructure-as-code tool. In reality, Terraform is third-party, multi-cloud tooling from HashiCorp; Google's own IaC-adjacent offerings are Config Connector and Fabric FAST.