Zero-Drift Environments

Continuously compare desired state to live cloud resources and generate safe, rollback-ready Terraform plans.

What it is

An automated sentinel that watches your cloud layout 24/7. It alerts you the moment someone makes a manual change ("ClickOps") that violates your Infrastructure-as-Code definitions, ensuring your production environment never diverges from your git repo.

When to use it

In strict compliance environments (SOC2, HIPAA, FedRAMP) where unauthorized changes are violations.
Large organizations where "Shadow IT" or hotfixes often bypass the CI/CD pipeline.
Debugging "it works in staging but not prod" issues caused by config drift.

Use Cases

Real-world scenarios

The "Open SSH" Incident

The Problem

A developer manually opened port 22 (SSH) to 0.0.0.0/0 on a production security group to debug an issue and forgot to revert it.

The Solution

DeployN's continuous drift detection picked up the security group rule change within 60 seconds of the API call.

Result: Auto-remediation triggered instantly, reverting the security group to its secure state before any scanner detected the vulnerability.

Unmanaged Resource Cleanups

The Problem

After a game day, 30+ large EC2 instances and unattached EBS volumes were left running, costing the company $400/day.

The Solution

The "Ghost Resource" report flagged assets existing in AWS but not in the Terraform state file.

Result: Saved $12,000/month by automatically terminating orphaned resources via a generated cleanup PR.

IAM Permission Creep

The Problem

Over time, an S3 bucket policy was manually relaxed to allow "Public Read" for a specific marketing campaign, violating data policies.

The Solution

DeployN detected the policy divergence from the Git-defined IAM definition.

Result: Security team was alerted via Slack and the policy was locked back down to "Private" immediately.

How It Works

Step 1:Baseline State

We ingest your `.tfstate` and current Git configuration to understand the "Desired State".

Step 2:Continuous Poll

Our read-only agent surveys your cloud provider APIs every 5-15 minutes.

Step 3:Diff Analysis

We compare Live vs. Desired. Any mismatch is flagged as Drift.

Step 4:Remediation

You choose: Auto-revert (GitOps enforcement) or Alert-only (Slack/PagerDuty).

Measurable Outcomes

100%

Compliance

Audit trail of every single change, manual or automated, forever.

-60%

MTTR

Mean Time To Recovery improves by eliminating "config mystery" during outages.

Cost Waste

No zombie resources left behind after experiments.

Technical Implementation

Critical

Enabling "Auto-Remediate" without first running in "Alert-Only" mode for 24 hours is not recommended for production environments.

Sample Drift Report

JSON

{
  "drift_id": "dr_8a92b1c",
  "resource_type": "aws_security_group",
  "resource_id": "sg-0123456789abcdef0",
  "timestamp": "2023-10-27T10:45:00Z",
  "changes": [
    {
      "attribute": "ingress.cidr_blocks",
      "expected": ["10.0.0.0/16"],
      "actual": ["10.0.0.0/16", "0.0.0.0/0"],
      "action": "delete"
    }
  ]
}

ARCHITECTURE FLOW

This diagram represents the logical flow of data within the Zero-Drift Environments module, demonstrating how it integrates with your existing stack.

Common Questions

How often does it check for drift?

Default is every 15 minutes. Enterprise plans support 1-minute intervals or event-driven (CloudTrail) triggers.

Is it safe to auto-revert?

You can configure "Safe Mode" which requires manual approval for destructive reverts (like deleting an RDS instance).

Does it support manual hotfixes?

Yes. You can "Snooze" drift detection for a specific resource for 1 hour if you need to emergency debug.

What clouds are supported?

AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Kubernetes support is in beta.

Do you need Write access?

For detection: No (Read-Only). For auto-remediation: Yes.

Ready to implement Zero-Drift Environments?

Join the waitlist to get early access and start building your visual infrastructure today.

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