What Is Infrastructure Drift?
Infrastructure drift is the gap that forms when live resources differ from what the infrastructure-as-code declares. It usually appears after manual console edits, automated mutations, or failed partial applies. Drift undermines the assumption that the code is the source of truth and can cause surprising plan diffs later.
Why it matters
Undetected drift makes deployments unpredictable, since the next apply may revert or clash with manual fixes. Regularly comparing actual state to code surfaces drift before it causes an incident.
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