Code Drift

Topic

Code drift, often referred to as configuration or infrastructure drift, is the gradual and unintended divergence of a software system's live environment from its defined baseline or source-of-truth code. This typically occurs when manual, undocumented changes are made directly to production environments rather than being deployed through standard continuous integration and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) pipelines. Over time, code drift can lead to security vulnerabilities, deployment failures, and inconsistencies across development and production environments.