Anyone working in DevOps today would likely agree that codifying resources makes it easier to observe, govern, and automate. However, most engineers would also acknowledge that this transformation brings with it a new set of challenges.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of IaC operations is drifts — a scenario where runtime environments deviate from their IaC-defined states, creating a festering issue that could have serious long-term implications. These discrepancies undermine the consistency of cloud environments, leading to potential issues with infrastructure reliability and maintainability and even significant security and compliance risks.