What Is Configuration Drift?
Configuration drift refers to the gradual and often unnoticed changes in a system’s configuration over time. These changes usually occur when updates or modifications are implemented outside of the established configuration management processes.
As a result, systems no longer match their documented configurations, leading to inconsistencies across different environments. Such discrepancies can complicate troubleshooting, as the root cause of an issue might stem from undocumented changes.
When systems differ from their intended states due to configuration drift, it can lead to a host of problems, including increased system instability and security vulnerabilities. Untracked changes can cause environments to behave unpredictably, challenging IT teams in maintaining system performance and reliability. Failing to address this drift can result in costly downtime and inefficient resource utilization.
This is part of a series of articles about configuration management
In this article:
Causes of Configuration Drift
There are several issues that can lead to drift between configuration files.
Manual Changes and Human Error
Manual interventions often lead to configuration drift. When administrators make direct changes to systems without updating documentation or configuration management tools, it creates discrepancies. These unauthorized changes can seem minor but accumulate over time, leading to significant deviations from the intended system configuration.
Human error plays a critical role as well. Even when changes are intentional, mistakes can occur at any point, whether during configuration settings updates or software patches installations. Such errors might go unnoticed immediately, but they can introduce bugs or vulnerabilities later.
Inconsistent and Manual Deployment Processes
Deploying applications or systems manually can result in configuration drift if the processes are inconsistent. Without standardized procedures, deployments are prone to variability, as different team members might follow different steps. This lack of uniformity introduces deviations across environments, causing the production system to differ from staging or development setups.
Manual processes are time-consuming and error-prone, further exacerbating the risk of drift. Automated deployment practices can mitigate this, ensuring consistent and repeatable procedures that uphold configuration integrity across environments.
Dependencies on External Systems
When systems rely heavily on external dependencies, they become vulnerable to configuration drift. Changes or updates to these external systems can directly impact the dependent systems, leading to unexpected configurations. For example, if a cloud service provider updates its API version or modifies feature behaviors, reliant systems must adapt or risk misconfiguration.
Lack of Version Control
Without version control, there’s little visibility into what changes have been made, when, and by whom. This lack of traceability can lead to significant configuration drift, as there’s no structured way to revert or compare configurations over time. Version control systems enable organizations to maintain a history of changes, ensuring transparency and enabling audits.
Related content: Read our guide to configuration management plan
Risks and Consequences of Configuration Drift
Configuration drift can contribute to a range of problems, especially as discrepancies between configuration files accumulate.
Security Vulnerabilities
As systems deviate from their intended configurations, they may develop vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. Changes, such as unauthorized open ports or outdated software versions, expose systems to threats that can compromise data integrity or result in unauthorized access.
Inconsistent configurations often bypass security measures that would otherwise provide protection. This oversight can lead to breaches, with potentially devastating financial and reputational impacts.
Performance Issues
Drift leads to performance inconsistencies across environments. When configurations vary, it can impact the optimal functioning of applications, resulting in slower processes or increased resource consumption. Systems might respond differently under load conditions, causing unpredictable behavior that affects user experience and operational efficiency.
Performance problems stemming from configuration drift are often hard to diagnose. The root cause might not be apparent, leading to prolonged downtime or degraded system performance.
Compliance Violations
Industries with strict regulatory requirements face significant risks from configuration drift. Unauthorized changes can lead to non-compliance with policies or standards, exposing organizations to audits and potential fines. Maintaining regulatory compliance necessitates proper documentation and consistently enforced configurations.
Drift breaks the alignment with predefined compliance frameworks, risking legal repercussions. An effective configuration management strategy must include mechanisms for verifying and documenting compliance-related configurations.
Tips From the Expert
In my experience, here are tips that can help you better manage and mitigate configuration drift:
- Implement drift detection tools: Use tools like AWS Config, Terraform Drift Detection, or Ansible Tower to actively monitor and alert for deviations from the desired state. These tools provide real-time insights and help identify drift before it causes issues.
- Set up immutable infrastructure patterns: Adopt an immutable infrastructure approach where systems are not updated in place. Instead, replace entire instances with new ones created from updated configurations. This practice eliminates the risk of unintended or undocumented changes.
- Leverage CI/CD pipelines for configuration updates: Ensure all configuration changes flow through CI/CD pipelines with built-in checks and automated testing. This enforces consistency and prevents unauthorized or untested changes from being deployed.
- Regularly reapply configuration baselines: Schedule automated processes to periodically reapply configuration baselines to all systems. This ensures any drift is corrected, even if it occurs outside normal workflows.
- Use policy as code for compliance: Integrate tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA) or Conftest to enforce configuration policies automatically. These tools ensure that all configurations adhere to security and operational guidelines.
Common Examples of Configuration Drift
Here are some of the most common scenarios that result in configuration drift.
Unauthorized Changes in Production Systems
Production systems are often the most critical to maintain, yet they are also prone to unauthorized changes. For example, a system administrator might temporarily open a firewall port to troubleshoot a connectivity issue. If the change resolves the issue, it might remain in place without being reverted or documented. Over time, these undocumented changes accumulate and deviate from the system’s intended state.
This type of drift creates vulnerabilities that are difficult to detect because the system behaves differently than documented. In high-stakes industries like finance or healthcare, such discrepancies can lead to compliance violations or expose sensitive data.
Differences Between Development and Production Environments
In many organizations, development, staging, and production environments are designed to mirror each other. However, inconsistencies frequently arise due to configuration drift. For example, a developer may install a debugging tool in the development environment that requires dependencies. If those dependencies are not propagated to the staging or production environments, the application may fail or behave unpredictably when deployed.
This type of drift often goes unnoticed until the later stages of testing or, worse, after deployment to production, leading to delayed releases or downtime. Aligning these environments requires automated tools like infrastructure as code (IaC) to enforce consistent configuration baselines.
Dynamic Changes in Cloud Environments
Cloud environments are inherently dynamic, often leading to configuration drift without proper controls in place. For example, an organization might scale its resources during peak usage by resizing instances or adding storage volumes. If these changes are made manually or outside of infrastructure as code workflows, they may not be recorded in the system’s configuration.
Untracked changes in the cloud can have cascading effects. For example, an instance type change might increase costs or affect performance due to different hardware specifications. Similarly, adjusting security group rules without documentation can leave open vulnerabilities.
5 Ways to Prevent or Minimize Configuration Drift
Organizations can minimize and mitigate the impact of configuration drift by applying these practices.
1. Use Version Control for All Configurations
Implementing version control systems for configuration files is crucial for drift prevention. Version control tracks every change made, providing a clear history and rollback capabilities if necessary. This ensures full transparency over configurations, enabling easier troubleshooting and compliance verification.
Beyond preventing unauthorized changes, version control enables collaboration by allowing multiple contributors to work on configurations safely. It reduces the risk of conflicting changes and ensures configurations remain aligned across environments.
2. Enforce Strict Change Management Processes
Changes should be documented, reviewed, and approved before implementation to ensure consistency. Such processes help maintain accountability and transparency, reducing the scope for unauthorized modifications.
Effective change management involves a detailed record of who made each change and why it was necessary. It also includes a rollback plan in case the new configuration introduces problems. Adhering to these practices ensures that all changes are intentional, documented, and reversible, preventing unintentional drift.
3. Automate Configuration Management
Automation tools simplify configuration management, ensuring consistency and reducing the chance of drift. By automating repetitive tasks like configuration checks and updates, organizations minimize human error and enforce consistency across environments. This approach increases reliability and frees up staff for strategic tasks.
Automated configuration management integrates with existing processes, offering real-time monitoring and corrective actions. It allows deviations to be corrected automatically before they lead to drift. Investing in automation tools supports sustainable management of complex IT environments.
4. Conduct Regular Compliance Checks
Regular compliance checks help identify and correct configuration drift before it becomes a significant issue. By aligning configurations with established policies and standards, organizations ensure they meet regulatory and security requirements. These checks act as a safeguard against drifting toward non-compliance.
Automated tools can aid in conducting these checks, providing real-time evaluations against compliance baselines. These tools help maintain continuous compliance, minimizing the risk of expensive penalties or reputational damage. Regular compliance audits help ensure systems remain secure and effective.
5. Educate Teams on Configuration Standards
Training programs should cover the importance of maintaining consistent configurations, the risks of drift, and how automated tools can assist. Awareness ensures that team members understand the impact of their actions on system stability and security.
Standardizing processes across teams ensures everyone follows the same set of guidelines when handling configurations. This collective consciousness prevents individual deviations from leading to systemic drift. Continuous education and clear communication reinforce adherence to configuration standards.
Preventing Configuration Drift with Configu
Configu is a configuration management platform comprised of two main components:
Configu Orchestrator
As applications become more dynamic and distributed in microservices architectures, configurations are getting more fragmented. They are saved as raw text that is spread across multiple stores, databases, files, git repositories, and third-party tools (a typical company will have five to ten different stores).
The Configu Orchestrator, which is open-source software, is a powerful standalone tool designed to address this challenge by providing configuration orchestration along with Configuration-as-Code (CaC) approach.
Configu Cloud
Configu Cloud is the most innovative store purpose-built for configurations, including environment variables, secrets, and feature flags. It is built based on the Configu configuration-as-code (CaC) approach and can model configurations and wrap them with unique layers, providing collaboration capabilities, visibility into configuration workflows, and security and compliance standardization.
Unlike legacy tools, which treat configurations as unstructured data or key-value pairs, Configu is leading the way with a Configuration-as-Code approach. By modeling configurations, they are treated as first-class citizens in the developers’ code. This makes our solution more robust and reliable and also enables Configu to provide more capabilities, such as visualization, a testing framework, and security abilities.
