State of infrastructure drift

As infrastructure as code becomes widely adopted by users with heterogenous skillsets, and the IaC codebases become larger, it becomes harder to track infrastructure drift.

Terraform drift can be driven by human input, poor configuration, applications making unwanted changes, etc. It has consequences on toil and efficiency, forces teams to put in place strict controls that decrease flexibility, and can have a security impact.

This study describes our findings and a few options to tackle drift. We interviewed 50+ teams to collect stories and feedback, and surveyed 200 teams of all size.