From Ghost Assets to Infrastructure Drift - Don't Get Spooked
summary
Data from more than 100 AWS production accounts shows the top five ghost assets: EC2 instances, IAM policies, SQS queues, CloudWatch alarms, and security groups, each causing cost, reliability or security pain. Code-first deployments with Terraform leave stale entries in state files; accidental deletions can be revived or cause outages. Practical fixes include running terraform apply -target to recreate, opening a PR to remove resource blocks, or using tools: Firefly for detection and auto-PRs, Click Oops (CloudTrail) for click-ops alerts, and driftctl for state-file checks.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Ghost assets and drift intro
- 4:37What is infrastructure drift
- 6:03Ghost assets and risks
- 7:52Top 5 AWS ghost assets
- 14:12Detecting and fixing ghost assets
- 15:58Firefly for ghost assets
- 18:28Preventing ghost assets
- 19:12Open source click-ops tools
- 20:34Summary
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