Practice English vocabulary for infrastructure drift: detecting drift, drift reports, reconciliation runs, disabling drift correction, and drift causing apply failures.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
What does 'the infrastructure has drifted from the declared state' mean?
Drift occurs when someone makes a manual change in the cloud console, an automated process modifies a resource, or a provider updates a default setting. The IaC code still describes the old state, creating a discrepancy.
2 / 5
What is a 'drift report that shows 3 manual changes'?
Drift reports are generated by running 'terraform plan' (which shows differences) or by dedicated drift detection tools. Each difference represents a resource that was changed outside of the IaC workflow, indicating drift.
3 / 5
What is a 'reconciliation run that corrects the drift'?
Reconciliation (also called remediation) applies the IaC configuration to override manual changes and restore the declared state. Some tools run reconciliation continuously (GitOps with Flux/ArgoCD for Kubernetes), while others require manual triggering.
4 / 5
Why might a team 'disable drift correction temporarily'?
During incidents, responders often make quick console changes to restore service. Auto-drift correction would immediately revert these changes. Teams disable it temporarily to allow the emergency fix, then codify the change in IaC and re-enable correction.
5 / 5
Why does 'drift cause the next apply to fail'?
Drift can make subsequent applies fail because Terraform's plan was based on the wrong state. For example, if a resource attribute was manually changed and Terraform tries to reference its expected value, it may find a conflict or missing resource.