Drift Detection
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Drift detection is the process of comparing what your infrastructure actually looks like versus what your code says it should look like. Run terraform plan and see a bunch of unexpected changes? That's drift detection at work. It's the infrastructure equivalent of 'spot the difference' — except the differences might be security holes.
Real Talk
Drift detection compares the actual state of infrastructure resources against the expected state defined in IaC templates. Tools include Terraform's state comparison (terraform plan), AWS CloudFormation drift detection, and third-party solutions like Driftctl and Spacelift. Continuous drift detection can be automated via CI/CD pipelines.
When You'll Hear This
"Our pipeline runs drift detection daily and alerts if anything changed." / "CloudFormation drift detection found three resources that were manually modified."
Related Terms
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Infrastructure Drift
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Terraform
Terraform is a tool that lets you describe your entire cloud infrastructure in code files, then type one command to make it real.