Terraform Config Drift How to Handle Out of Band Infrastructure Changes
summary
Explains exactly how Terraform detects and reacts to out‑of‑band changes: Terraform refreshes state against providers, treats managed vs non-managed resources differently, reverts attributes that are explicitly set (or have defaults), and only notifies about attributes with no configured value. Shows CLI behavior: terraform plan/apply, plan file override still applies saved changes (with a state-version sanity check), and terraform apply -refresh-only updates state without changing infrastructure. Provides a decision flowchart and practical remediation steps.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to Terraform drift
- 4:00How Terraform works
- 13:01Managed vs non-managed resources
- 15:32Managed attribute changes
- 18:03Non-managed attribute changes
- 20:48Plan file changes
- 23:40Summary and best practices
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