Configuration drift occurs when infrastructure deviates from its intended state over time due to manual changes, automatic updates, or system modifications. This cheat sheet provides comprehensive techniques for detecting, preventing, and remediating configuration drift across cloud platforms, IaC tools, and enterprise systems.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 20 focused tables and 160 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Core Concepts and DefinitionsTable 2: Drift Detection MethodsTable 3: Cloud Platform Detection - AWSTable 4: Cloud Platform Detection - Azure and GCPTable 5: IaC Drift Detection - TerraformTable 6: IaC Drift Detection - CloudFormation and PulumiTable 7: Kubernetes Drift Detection and GitOpsTable 8: Configuration Management Tools Drift DetectionTable 9: Third-Party Drift Detection PlatformsTable 10: Drift Remediation StrategiesTable 11: Drift Prevention Best PracticesTable 12: Continuous Monitoring and SchedulingTable 13: Policy-Based Enforcement and GuardrailsTable 14: Audit Trails and Compliance LoggingTable 15: Dashboards, Visualization, and ReportingTable 16: Root Cause Analysis and InvestigationTable 17: Reconciliation Loops and Control PatternsTable 18: Network Configuration DriftTable 19: CMDB and Change Management IntegrationTable 20: Security and Reliability Impact
Table 1: Core Concepts and Definitions
| Concept | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
Server firewall rules change from documented baseline | Gradual divergence of a system's active configuration from its intended security baseline or documented state over time | |
Comparing current cloud resources to IaC templates | Process of analyzing and alerting changes in infrastructure state by comparing actual configuration against desired state | |
Known security-hardened server configuration | Reference configuration representing approved state, used as comparison point for drift detection | |
Manually-configured production server with unique settings | Server with unique configuration that cannot be reliably reproduced, often result of undocumented manual changes |