Work out infrastructure drift count instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Drift is the gap between declared and actual infrastructure, and it accumulates at the rate of manual change multiplied by the reconciliation interval. Once a meaningful share of resources has drifted, the IaC repository stops being a reliable description of production, which means disaster recovery from code no longer works — the real cost of drift.
Drift accumulation
drift rate = drifted / managed; drift per cycle = manual changes per week x interval in weeks
Remove human write access to production and require all changes through the pipeline. Detection without prevention just produces a recurring report nobody acts on.
Continuous reconciliation is ideal for stateless resources. Be careful with anything holding data, where reverting a manual change could destroy it.