IaC Drift & State Language
Terraform state drift, state refresh, import, taint — vocabulary for managing infrastructure state. Intermediate
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An SRE says: "We have state drift — the production load balancer was modified manually in the AWS Console."
What will happen on the next terraform apply?
State drift = divergence between the .tf configuration (desired state) and the real infrastructure's current state. The reconciliation flow:
terraform refresh— queries AWS API, updates the state file with current real-world attributesterraform plan— compares refreshed state against configuration, shows diffsterraform apply— reverts the manually applied changes to match the configuration
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| drift detection | Identifying when real infrastructure diverges from its declared configuration |
| configuration drift | Accumulated out-of-band changes that cause infrastructure to deviate from the intended state |
| reconciliation | The process of bringing real infrastructure back in line with declared configuration |
| infrastructure immutability | Principle that infrastructure should only be changed via code, never manually |