Consumer. A fabric consumer is any user-defined application, residing inside or outside a fabric, that acts as a client making processing requests to the fabric. Consumers residing outside the fabric communicate with the fabric over a TCP/IP connection. The communication between a client and the fabric can be encrypted using a standard SSL encryption algorithm. Computers running a client must have the .NET, 'C', or Java Fabric Client API libraries.

Worker. A worker is a single computer that works as a processing node within a fabric. At any given time a worker is dedicated to a single fabric. Workers in the same fabric must run the same operating system; however, their hardware configuration does not need to be identical.

Fabric application. A fabric application is a collection of process flows and tasks. External entities access a fabric application by submitting requests using the fabric API. A fabric can simultaneously support multiple applications, each running as a separate process. Workers are capable of running any of these applications at any time.