While Terraform possesses the declarative model for managing infrastructure across cloud platforms, it makes one assumption that is rare at scale: that the state of the deployed infrastructure is always managed exclusively through Terraform. In practice, environments evolve. Under such pressure, teams manually make changes, apply hotfixes directly in the cloud console, and deploy infrastructure through the parallelisation of automation.

These changes create configuration drift outside of the Terraform lifecycle. The infrastructure stays functional but is misaligned with the Terraform codebase, causing unpredictable behavior, broken expectations, and sometimes even production incidents.