Infrastructure drift occurs when the actual state of your infrastructure deviates from its intended or documented state. When left unchecked, drift creates unpredictable systems and slows down incident response. However, with the right approach, it’s a surprisingly manageable challenge. As organizations scale, managing this drift becomes a critical aspect of maintaining operational integrity. In this blog post, we’ll explore the evolution of infrastructure drift, discuss modern tools for detection, outline automated remediation approaches, and share best practices for ensuring infrastructure consistency.

The Evolution of Infrastructure Drift

Historically, infrastructure was managed manually, leading to inevitable human errors and drift over time. The good news is that infrastructure management has evolved significantly, giving us more powerful tools than ever to tackle drift:

• Configuration Management Tools like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, which brought a more programmatic approach to infrastructure management, drift was somewhat mitigated. However, these tools often required manual intervention to detect and correct discrepancies.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) significantly changed the landscape by treating infrastructure setup as software development. Tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation allow for versioning of infrastructure, making it easier to track changes and manage state. However, even with IaC, discrepancies can arise due to manual configurations or changes outside the IaC scope.

• Containerization and Orchestration with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes introduced another layer of abstraction, where drift could occur at the level of container configurations or cluster setups.

Modern Tools for Drift Detection

• IaC Tools: Beyond defining infrastructure, tools like Terraform can now detect drift by comparing the actual cloud state with the state file.

• Monitoring and Observability Platforms: We leverage powerful platforms like Datadog or Prometheus to proactively catch system changes.

• Compliance and Security Tools: Products like Chef Compliance or AWS Config can be configured to monitor for policy violations, which often correlate with drift.

• Custom Scripts and Tools: Many organizations write custom scripts to scan environments for changes, leveraging APIs to check configurations against expected states.

Automated Remediation Approaches

Here’s where creativity meets competence—there are several powerful approaches to automate drift management:

• Self-healing Systems: Using IaC, you can set up systems that automatically correct deviations by applying the latest infrastructure code whenever a drift is detected.

• Automated Rollbacks: If a change causes drift or issues, systems can be configured to automatically roll back to a known good state.

• CI/CD for Infrastructure: Integrating infrastructure changes into continuous integration and deployment pipelines ensures that any change is tested and validated before being applied to production, reducing the likelihood of drift.

• Policy as Code: Tools like Open Policy Agent allow policies to be defined in code, which can automatically enforce compliance and prevent drift by rejecting non-compliant changes.

Best Practices for Maintaining Infrastructure Consistency at Scale

1. Version Control Everything: Use Git or similar version control systems for not only code but also for infrastructure configurations. This practice helps in tracking changes, understanding when drift occurred, and reverting if necessary.
2. Immutable Infrastructure: Instead of updating servers in place, treat them as immutable. When changes are needed, deploy new instances with updated configurations, reducing the chance of configuration drift.
3. Regular Audits and Compliance Checks: Schedule regular scans of your infrastructure to ensure it matches the intended state. This can be part of your CI/CD pipeline or nightly jobs.
4. Educate and Train: Ensure that everyone involved in infrastructure management understands the importance of consistency and the tools used to achieve it. Clear training and understanding empower teams to prevent drift.
5. Decouple State Management: Use state management tools that are not tightly coupled to specific cloud providers or infrastructure tools, allowing for more flexibility and easier drift detection across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
6. Feedback Loops: Implement systems where feedback from operations can quickly inform and influence infrastructure management practices, ensuring that lessons learned from drift incidents are used to improve processes.
7. Blueprinting: Develop detailed blueprints or golden images that define the standard configuration for each type of system, ensuring that any new deployment starts from a known, consistent state.

The Rhythmic Approach

At Rhythmic, we’ve crafted a resourceful approach to managing and mitigating infrastructure drift, which begins with a strong foundation in documentation and process:

• Diagramming and Change Management:

  • We initially opt for manual processes when mapping out or iterating on new or existing environments. This stage is crucial for understanding the current state and identifying potential areas of drift or where automation could be beneficial.

  • Change Tracking: Every change, no matter how small, is meticulously recorded. We use Git repositories for version control, ensuring that all changes are logged, reviewed, and can be reverted if necessary. This practice not only helps in managing drift but also serves as a knowledge base for the team.

• Defining Infrastructure:

  • Once we have a clear picture of the environment, we proceed to define the infrastructure explicitly.

  • Terraform for Cloud Resources: We almost always leverage Terraform for defining and provisioning cloud resources. This ensures that our infrastructure is both repeatable and version-controlled, reducing the risk of drift due to manual configurations.

• Application Configuration:

  • Ansible, Containers, and Scripts: Configuring applications on these resources usually involves:

    • Ansible for detailed, state-driven configuration management.

    • Container Images to encapsulate application environments, ensuring consistency across deployments.

    • Shell Scripts for quick, custom configurations where Ansible might be overkill.

  • The philosophy here is to automate as much as possible:

    • Elimination of Human Error: By scripting and automating configurations, we minimize human error, which is often a significant contributor to infrastructure drift.

    • Explicit Configuration: Making each configuration explicit ensures that all critical knowledge is documented rather than being held by individual developers, promoting transparency and maintainability.

This approach not only helps in managing infrastructure drift but also aligns with our goal of making infrastructure changes predictable, auditable, and resilient against operational surprises. By treating infrastructure management as a development process, we can apply software engineering best practices to infrastructure, ensuring that our systems are not only functional but also consistent and scalable

Conclusion

Managing infrastructure drift at scale is an ongoing challenge that requires a blend of modern tools, automation, and disciplined practices. By understanding the evolution of infrastructure management, leveraging new technologies for detection and remediation, and adhering to best practices, organizations can significantly reduce operational risks, enhance system reliability, and decrease the time spent on incident management. As the infrastructure landscape continues to evolve, so too must our strategies for maintaining consistency and control.

By integrating these practices into your organization’s methodology, you can tackle the complexities of infrastructure management at scale, ensuring that your systems remain consistent, reliable, and easy to manage over time. While infrastructure drift presents real challenges, we’ve found that combining modern tools with creative problem-solving creates robust, reliable systems that give our clients peace of mind.