Configuration Drift
Noun · Development
Definitions
The gradual divergence between the intended configuration of systems and their actual state in different environments or over time. Configuration drift causes hard-to-reproduce bugs because staging, production, and local environments stop behaving the same even though the code may be identical.
In plain English: When systems slowly stop matching the intended or expected configuration.
Example: "The incident was traced to configuration drift: one production node still had an old retry limit and feature flag combination long after the rest of the fleet had changed."