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DevOps Intermediate

What is Infrastructure Drift?

The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.

Infrastructure drift occurs when someone makes manual changes to servers, cloud resources, or configurations that are not reflected in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) definitions. This creates an inconsistency where the code no longer accurately represents reality. Drift causes unpredictable behavior, makes disaster recovery unreliable, and undermines the repeatability that IaC promises. Detection tools include terraform plan (shows differences), AWS Config (tracks resource changes), and drift detection features in CloudFormation. Prevention strategies include enforcing changes only through IaC pipelines, locking down manual console access, and running regular drift detection scans.

Related Terms

Configuration Management
The practice of systematically managing and maintaining consistent server configurations across infrastructure.
Artifact Repository
A centralized storage system for build artifacts like compiled binaries, packages, and container images used in CI/CD pipelines.
Vault
A tool by HashiCorp for securely managing secrets, encryption keys, and certificates with dynamic secret generation.
Docker Compose
A tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications using a YAML configuration file.
Jenkins
An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software through configurable CI/CD pipelines.
Canary Deployment
A deployment strategy that gradually rolls out changes to a small subset of users before deploying to the entire infrastructure.
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