[AG.DEP.2] Continuously baseline environments to manage drift
Category: FOUNDATIONAL
Baselining environments is a structured process for routinely updating and standardizing individual environments within the landing zone to match a specified configured state or baseline. Drift management, a part of this process, involves the identification and resolution of differences between the environment's current configuration and its desired baseline state.
Regular baselining helps to ensure consistency across environments at scale, minimizing errors and enhancing operational efficiency and governance capabilities. The centralized platform team that manages the landing zone and environments within require the ability to consistently add new features, security configuration, performance improvements, or resolving detected drift issues.
The team must be able to baseline all targeted environments every time a change is made to the overall landing zone desired state definition or when a misconfiguration is detected within the environment.
It is the shared responsibility of the platform team and teams operating workloads to verify that the correct policies, alerts, and resources are configured properly and securely. As these teams are both making changes to the same environment, it is important that all controls and resources managed by the platform team are secured against unauthorized modifications by other teams operating within the environment. Changes being made by the platform team to the environment should be communicated to the other teams to promote a culture of transparency and collaboration.
All deployment, updates, or new features made to the environments should be made through an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach, which allows for version control, testing, and reproducibility of environments. It is also recommended to have a separate staging environment to test these changes before they are deployed to the production environments, further reducing the risk of disruptions or errors.
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