Production drift begins when live infrastructure changes outside Terraform’s control. Manual console edits, automation from other systems, and conflicting ownership all cause infrastructure to diverge from the declared configuration.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how Terraform compares configuration, state, and live AWS resources to identify drift before making changes. You’ll also see why lifecycle.ignore_changes exists, when it should be used, and why assigning a single owner to each infrastructure attribute reduces operational risk.
Understanding drift is less about Terraform syntax and more about understanding infrastructure ownership in production environments.