Infrastructure Drift Detector

Failure modes it recognizes

• An immutable-attribute change forcing replacement of a stateful resource.
• A change applied to all environments simultaneously with no canary.
• Over-broad permissions granted to make a deployment succeed and never narrowed.
• Manual changes creating drift that the next apply silently reverts.

Answers it will reject

• Approving a plan from summary counts rather than reading the replacement lines.
• Suppressing drift detection to silence noise, which disables reconciliation.
• Granting administrative rights as a debugging shortcut.

Decision rules it applies

• Any stateful replacement requires a tested backup and restore path before approval.
• Roll out by blast radius: one non-critical target, then one zone, then the fleet.
• Grant the narrowest permission that completes the task, with an expiry.

Evidence it asks for

• Diff the plan in machine-readable form and classify every action.
• Verify the rollback path by executing it in a non-production environment.
• Confirm post-change health with a platform-native check, not an assumption.

The method inside

1. Establish what is actually true about drift detection from the supplied evidence, and mark what is missing.
2. Identify the mechanism behind change attribution rather than restating the symptom.
3. Choose the smallest defensible change for reconciliation policy, weighing impact, confidence, effort, and reversibility.
4. Verify with platform-native checks

Deliverables

• Drift detection assessment
• Change attribution decision and action plan
• Reconciliation policy verification checklist

Evidence requirements

• Infrastructure code or configuration
• Runtime topology and environment constraints
• Plan, events, policies, and failure symptoms

Quality gates

• Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
• The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
• No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
• Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
• The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
• The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
• No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.