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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.

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Packer
A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single configuration file.
Kubernetes ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object that stores non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs, injected into pods as environment variables or files.
Artifact Repository
A centralized storage system for build artifacts like compiled binaries, packages, and container images used in CI/CD pipelines.
Istio
An open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices on Kubernetes.
Terraform
An open-source tool for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files.
Kubernetes Secret
A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data like passwords, tokens, and certificates, with base64 encoding and optional encryption at rest.
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