Drift Is Preventable
It’s a Symptom of Platform Design, Not Developer Behavior.
If you’ve ever managed cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you know the word that makes every platform engineer cringe: drift. Drift happens when your actual infrastructure doesn’t match what’s in code. For years, we’ve treated drift like the weather: unpredictable, unavoidable, and something we just react to after the fact. At Massdriver, we’ve taken a different approach. We believe drift isn’t inevitable—it’s a design problem. And with the right design, you can stop fighting it altogether.
Why Drift Really Happens
Let’s break down the main reasons drift occurs:
1. Auto-scaling and dynamic environments. When infrastructure automatically changes, like nodes scaling up and down, IaC systems often try to capture that state. But those values change constantly, creating drift by design.
2. Emergencies at 2 a.m. Picture this: production is down, someone logs into AWS directly to fix it, bypassing IaC entirely. The immediate problem is solved, but now your code and your environment don’t match.
3. Developers bypassing IaC. Sometimes the AWS console or a direct psql command is simply easier than the IaC process. When the path of least resistance is outside your platform, drift is inevitable.
Why Detection and Reconciliation Don’t Cut It
Like most teams, we first explored the obvious fixes: detect drift, alert on it, and reconcile when possible. We integrated with AWS CloudTrail and Azure logging, and in many cases it worked—at least for hyperscalers. But once someone is managing PostgreSQL resources with Terraform, what do you do? Reconciling off the WAL? What about the Domino’s Pizza API? The whole approach started to break down. And even when detection worked, the solutions weren’t satisfying:
• Reconciliation can undo a hotfix that just saved production, effectively breaking things again.
• Alerts pile up and become noise. Developers already know they made the change—it’s not useful to be pinged about it. Now your “easy path” isn’t just difficult, it’s annoying too.
• The logic for reconciliation is brittle and doesn’t cover every environment or tool.
But drift isn’t inevitable.
Our Lightbulb Moment: Prevention, Not Cure
The real breakthrough for us was realizing that drift is preventable. Developers don’t create drift out of spite—they do it because their platforms are painful to use, the rules are too rigid, or the console is simply faster. So the way to eliminate drift isn’t to detect it after the fact—it’s to design platforms that make the right path the easy path. If your IaC platform is easier to use than AWS, developers won’t drift.
How We Designed Massdriver Around Prevention
When we built Massdriver, we started by removing the pain points that cause drift in the first place. Instead of expecting developers to wrestle with snowflake workflows or copy-pasted Terraform files, we took a different approach:
• Terraform modules become UIs and workflows. Developers get a ClickOps-like interface that feels familiar, but under the hood it’s still IaC.
• Database, not Git, as the source of truth. Everything in Massdriver is backed by a database. That means ops can query, mutate, and inventory resources with the power of a relational engine—not grep through Git or YAML blobs.
• Ephemeral root modules. Massdriver dynamically generates root modules and workflows as you diagram infrastructure from your IaC bundles, reducing complexity and avoiding snowflake pipeline sprawl.
• Day-2 operations built-in. Need to batch change instance types across environments? Easy. Want to trace a resource back to its child module? It’s all cross-referenced in the database.
Rethinking IaC: From GitOps to Developer-Friendly IaC
The industry has spent 15 years jamming operations into Git and CI/CD pipelines. But operations is too complex to be managed like application code. What we need is something more powerful: a platform that abstracts and streamlines cloud management into a consistent, intuitive experience—powerful enough for operators, but simple enough that anyone can use it confidently. Massdriver provides that by backing infrastructure with a queryable database and focusing on use cases, not monolithic modules.
Take Postgres as an example. A transactional Postgres setup is very different from one used for vector databases. Instead of shoving both into a single generic module, Massdriver encourages splitting them into use-case-specific modules. Developers pick the right one from the UI, ops teams refine modules based on feedback, and the platform evolves. This isn’t just an IaC "runner"—it's a self-service platform built using your IaC and your policies, but in a way that is simple for developers to use without having to learn your tooling.
Wrapping It Up
Drift doesn’t have to be inevitable. It’s not a law of nature—it’s a symptom of poor platform design. By making the right path the easy path, we’ve found that drift simply doesn’t show up. At Massdriver, we’re not trying to detect drift after it happens—we’re working to prevent it entirely. And in doing so, we’ve built what we think is the next evolution of IaC: not introducing another language, but making infrastructure truly usable and adoptable at scale.
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