Cloud Configuration Drift: How Silent State Changes Become Expensive Incidents

Every cloud incident debrief eventually surfaces the same sentence: "Someone made a manual change." The change was small. It fixed an urgent problem. Nobody updated Terraform. Three months later, a security scan flagged an open port that the IaC said should not exist, and the team spent two days tracing which deployment broke which assumption. That is configuration drift. It is not a single event. It is a process, and it compounds. What Configuration Drift Actually Is (And Why It Spreads) Config