Company
Date Published
Dec. 23, 2024
Author
James Walker
Word count
2035
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Infrastructure drift refers to discrepancies between live resources in a cloud environment and their defined state in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) configuration files. It's a common cause of errors, compliance violations, and instability. Drift can be caused by various factors such as manual changes, conflicting tools, automatic updates, external dependencies, and human error. Effective drift management involves detecting, analyzing, and resolving discrepancies to maintain stable operations and ensure consistency, security, and compliance across the cloud environment. Automation and consistency are key themes in managing drift, using IaC and CI/CD tools to exclusively manage infrastructure. Spacelift provides a powerful drift management feature that automates detection and reconciliation of drift for IaC resources, ensuring the desired state is maintained in real-time.