It always starts the same way:
"A Thursday release window. Pager buzzing. A checkout service timing out in one region but not another. The Terraform plan looked clean, the change ticket was approved, yet production behaviour doesn't match what's written in code. Somewhere between intent and reality, your cloud drifted. And now you're explaining a preventable incident to the business."
The Problem (What Teams Live Through Every Week)
In modern, multi-cloud stacks, drift is constant—and invisible until it hurts.
Manual hotfixes that disappear
A manual hotfix at 2:13 AM doesn't make it back to Infra-as-Code.
Wrong configurations inherited
A new microservice inherits the wrong security group because a tag was off by one character.
Temporary becomes permanent
A "temporary" test environment survives the sprint and quietly burns money and risk.
These small deviations pile up. Pipelines that ran yesterday fail today. IAM permissions morph from least privilege to "just make it work." Audits become archaeology: screenshots, CSVs, and guesswork. Meanwhile, your best engineers spend Fridays reconciling dashboards instead of shipping. The hardest part? You rarely spot drift in the moment—you find it when bills spike, an outage escalates, or compliance asks awkward questions.
The Agitation (Why It Won't Fix Itself)
Left alone, drift eats time, money, and credibility.
Incidents last longer
Triaging across AWS, Azure, and GCP means context-switching through ten tabs while SLAs tick down. Customers don't see the effort; they feel the delay.
Automation breaks
Tags go missing, policies slip, and IaC pipelines crumble under mismatched realities. Teams patch around the breakage, cementing bad patterns.
Audits get ugly
Evidence is scattered, owners are unclear, and policy exceptions multiply. What should be an hour of verification turns into a two-week scramble.
Costs creep
Orphaned volumes, forgotten clusters, and zombie environments don't file expense reports—they just drain budget until someone notices.
You're not choosing between speed and control. Without the right guardrails, you lose both.
The Solution (Cloudshot's Drift Engine in the Real World)
Cloudshot was built so your declared state and deployed state stay in lock-step—without turning engineers into policy cops.
1) Real-time drift detection (IaC + reality, reconciled continuously)
Cloudshot watches your live environments and compares them to what your Terraform (or Pulumi) declares. The moment a security group, tag, instance type, or network boundary deviates, it flags what changed, where, when, and by whom—so you act in minutes, not days. No more discovering mismatches during a postmortem.
2) Policy guardrails & auto-remediation (fix drift, don't just find it)
Finding drift is table stakes. Cloudshot goes further with policy enforcement and auto-remediation. Missing tags are auto-filled from trusted sources. Non-compliant resources can be quarantined or rolled back via safe, approved playbooks. Engineers stay fast; standards stay intact.
3) Role-based views (the right signal for the right person)
DevOps sees the blast radius on a live visual map. Security sees posture, exceptions, and approvals. Finance sees cost hygiene and allocation accuracy by owner, app, and BU. Everyone is looking at the same truth—through the lens they need.
4) Evidence on tap (audit-ready, every day)
Every remediation, exception, and approval is captured automatically. Generate audit-friendly reports in minutes with the precise changes, owners, and timestamps auditors ask for—no screenshots, no spreadsheets, no archaeology.
5) Calm, not chaos (from firefighting to foresight)
With real-time detection and self-healing, Friday "cleanups" disappear. Engineers reclaim hours. Incidents shrink. And your infra finally behaves like the code that defines it.
What Users Say
"Drift used to be the ghost in our machine. Cloudshot surfaced it the instant it happened—and fixed half of it automatically. MTTR dropped, our audit sailed through, and for once we weren't arguing with finance about unexplained spend."
— DevOps Lead, e-commerce platform
Take the Guesswork Out of Drift—Today
If your scripts say "all good" but production keeps surprising you, you don't have a tooling shortage—you have a visibility and guardrail gap. Cloudshot closes it.
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See drift detection and self-remediation in action within your own accounts.