Your CI-CD Pipeline Is Your Real Infrastructure Control Plane

Terraform defines desired state. Kubernetes reconciles workload state. Cloud consoles expose state. None of those systems decides whether infrastructure state is allowed to change. The CI-CD pipeline does — or more precisely, the CI-CD pipeline is the only system in most environments that can hold that authority. That distinction — between storing state and having authority over state change — is the one most infrastructure teams haven't made explicitly. It's the gap that explains where drift or