The Hidden Impacts of Drift

Infrastructure drift can significantly disrupt IT operations, affecting your reliability, visibility, governance, and even costs. Drift may start as a slight inconvenience, but over time, differences can build up and lead to unexpected behaviors and vulnerabilities, bypassing established processes. 

Understanding the primary causes of infrastructure drift is essential for preventing these issues and maintaining a reliable and governed cloud environment.

Infrastructure drift is the process in which the actual state of your environment diverges from the desired or configured state. This usually happens when changes are made outside your IaC deployment processes.

Here are some of the main reasons why drift happens:

• High-severity issues that need urgent attention
• Frustration with using set processes/tools vs “the easy way”
• Human errors
• Edge case for making quick changes
• Lack of automation
• API changes
• Improper role-based access control (RBAC)

If you want to understand more about why drift happens, read our  “Top 7 Causes of Drift” article.

Drift can affect your organization in four key areas:

• Visibility – It’s harder to track the current state of your infrastructure if the IaC pushed into your VCS isn’t the single source of truth. The actual state of your infrastructure is unknown, and teams lose sight of what’s running, how the resources are utilized, and how configurations have evolved
• Governance—Unintended changes inside your infrastructure may bypass your security policies, exposing it to unexpected risks. Enforcing your policies and compliance requirements becomes challenging, and maintaining control over your critical assets can be a nightmare.
• Reliability – Misconfigurations or unmanaged resources lead to unpredictable failures or degraded performance, so your overall system stability suffers.
• Cloud costs – Drift usually results in unnecessary resources or misconfigured settings that raise costs. Resulting performance issues may lead to business or revenue losses.

When infrastructure changes are not tracked accurately, it’s difficult for teams to understand their environment clearly, which directly affects all engineers involved in the infrastructure processes.

Security teams face increased risk from assets that fall outside standard policies, leaving the organization vulnerable. Drift creates changes that can bypass essential security checks, introducing vulnerabilities that are harder to detect and address promptly.

When changes are made outside the process, and drift is introduced, subsequent modifications to the codebase will produce unpredictable results. This usually delays deployments significantly, and operations have to focus on troubleshooting. 

This unpredictability slows down the entire delivery pipeline, reducing the operation teams’ overall agility.

Infrastructure drift forces your operations team to inspect configurations manually to identify the errors it causes. This diverts operations from working on high-impact improvements, resulting in significant productivity losses.

Drift gives your whole organization an inaccurate picture of its infrastructure. Architects struggle to assess the infrastructure, limiting their ability to optimize and plan for the future.

Resources created outside the process can be hard to track. Architects and platform engineers have a hard time managing costs effectively when they lack visibility into the resources and their usage.

Inadequate governance makes drift virtually inevitable. Drift can also affect your governance overall when changes directly impact the policies or the security scanning tools you are using to keep your infrastructure safe.

Due to improper RBAC, some users who shouldn’t have permissions can make changes outside the process. The resulting infrastructure drift can challenge both the security and operations teams.

Misconfigurations create risk for architects and the security team, who must ensure adherence to industry regulations. Inadequate resource visibility and the possibility that drift may be missed make security audits stressful and time-consuming.

These misconfigurations can generate violations of regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI, with immediate financial consequences: Fines reduce organizational profitability and negatively impact brand perception.

Drift can introduce security vulnerabilities that may result in data breaches, forcing both the security and architect teams to shift their focus from improvements to firefighting.

Infrastructure drift can result in performance degradation, which affects the reliability of your entire platform. Unreliable applications lead to a poor user experience, frustrating users and ultimately reducing customer retention.

Infrastructure inconsistency caused by drift leads to downtime or API failures. The operations and architect teams must address these failures as they impact the overall system reliability.

When there is drift, performance is affected, putting pressure on engineering leaders to fix latency issues and degraded performance.

Failed deployments caused by drift frustrate the entire team. A breakdown in the release pipeline will always affect the reliability of your infrastructure.

Drift can increase cost in two key ways: First, it can affect your application performance, reducing efficiency and ultimately damaging revenue. Second, it can create untracked resources, which increase costs unnecessarily. Here is a breakdown of the financial impact of drift:

Infrastructure drift leads to unaccounted resource consumption, resulting in budget overruns and financial issues. Bills are unexpected, making it difficult for architects and platform engineers to forecast and control expenses.

In regulated industries, having drift can lead to many problems for your organization. Receiving fines for non-compliance shifts the budget from developing new features to fixing the issues that caused the non-compliance.

Misconfigurations can increase your infrastructure spending, but they can also raise performance issues that cause business losses. Inefficient resource allocation raises costs and impacts the financial planning of your organization.

Downtime and degraded performance impact revenue directly because users will probably seek more reliable alternatives.

Infrastructure drift must be fixed somehow, and this will usually involve allocating additional personnel and financial resources. As a result, your engineers will probably have to work overtime or pause development to fix the drift. In some cases, specialized consulting firms may be required to address the drift, generating significant unforeseen expenses.

The most important remedy for drift is to prevent it as much as possible. 

Spacelift helps you avoid drift with features such as:

• Policy as code minimizes human error and unauthorized changes.
• Spaces ensure RBAC is implemented and partial admin rights can be granted to avoid frustration.
• Custom inputs allow you to integrate security vulnerability scanning tools into your workflows to minimize vulnerabilities and define custom policies for them.
• Blueprints enable self-service infrastructure that helps avoid drift by ensuring all resources respect the governance mechanisms you have implemented. User-friendly templates mitigate frustration.
• Contexts are reusable containers for your variables, files, and lifecycle hooks that can be attached to multiple configurations, minimizing the potential for error considerably.
• Cloud integrations: Dynamic and short-lived credentials for AWS, Azure, and GCP, ensure that no accounts or roles are targeted by mistake.

In some cases, drift cannot be avoided, which means a detection mechanism is required to overcome these issues. Spacelift offers a drift detection and remediation mechanism that can be easily leveraged for infrastructure drift.

You simply define a schedule to automatically check your infrastructure for drift. This periodical scan will check the current state of your infrastructure against the IaC configuration. Regardless of how many configurations you have, the Spacelift Resources View and dashboard features enable instant visibility of any resources that have drifted. Instead of checking every configuration for drift detection results, you simply check a single screen to see the status.

If you enable drift remediation, a remediation job will start returning your resources to the state you had in your IaC code as soon as drift is detected. Alternatively, you can disable auto-deploy, check the remediation plan, and decide whether to return the infrastructure state to what it was before by applying the plan — or discard the remediation run,  make the changes to your code, and push them in your VCS. By checking the plan, you will know exactly what has changed, making it easy to decide whether to implement those changes to your code or simply revert them.

Infrastructure drift can negatively impact your visibility, governance, and reliability and can even produce considerable unexpected costs.

You should always implement as many shift-left mechanisms as possible to prevent drift, but ultimately these simply reduce the amount of drift. Drift is unavoidable, so take the time to look at specialized detection solutions that also give you the option to remediate drift.

Spacelift helps you in either scenario, so create an account today or book a demo with one of our engineers to see this in action.