What is Infrastructure Drift and how can it be prevented?

Infrastructure drift occurs when the live state of your infrastructure no longer matches the desired state defined in your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) configurations. This can happen due to manual changes made outside of the IaC workflow, changes in external dependencies, or failures in deployment processes, potentially leading to instability, security vulnerabilities, or compliance violations. To prevent drift, teams can implement continuous reconciliation using tools like Terraform with automated plan/apply cycles, or adopt GitOps practices with tools like Argo CD or Flux, which continuously monitor and sync the actual infrastructure state with the source of truth stored in Git repositories.