How Infrastructure Drift Happens and How Engineering Teams Can Stop It
Infrastructure drift occurs when the actual state of cloud resources diverges from what is declared in code, often due to manual console edits, undocumented emergency fixes, or incomplete IaC migrations. The problem creates serious risks including security audit failures, unreliable disaster recovery, and untraceable configuration changes. DevOps engineer Dr. Samson Tanimawo outlines common causes and recommends running scheduled Terraform plans to automatically detect and alert teams to unexpected changes. Additional preventive measures include using cloud-native tools like AWS Config, enforcing Git as the single source of truth, and restricting manual edit permissions so all changes must go through CI/CD pipelines. Tanimawo argues the core challenge is cultural — shifting teams away from console-first habits toward treating version-controlled infrastructure code as the definitive record of system state.
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