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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Configuration drift

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, configuration drift means: A difference that develops between a system's actual configuration and its intended or recorded configuration.

In Turkish: yapılandırma sapması

How it is used

Used in infrastructure reviews. Drift can arise from manual fixes, incomplete automation or uncontrolled changes.

Example sentences

  1. A manual firewall change caused configuration drift between the server and its declared settings.

    The running environment no longer matched the configuration stored as its reference.

  2. The nightly check detected configuration drift before the next deployment overwrote the hotfix.

    Detection reveals an unrecorded difference that automated deployment might otherwise remove.

Common collocations

  • detect configuration drift
  • prevent configuration drift
  • configuration managementUsing tools to keep the software, settings and files on many servers in a known, consistent state, instead of changing each server by hand.
  • infrastructure as codeManaging servers, networks and other cloud resources by writing configuration files that tools read and apply, instead of clicking through a console by hand.

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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