Drift detection for building blocks
preview
J
Johannes Rudolph
As a platform team we'd like to monitor the health of deployed building blocks, especially whether there is any unwanted drift. Drift can occur due to side administration, immature terraform practices (e.g. missing lifecycle ignore_changes), or an unclear shared responsibility
This ticket is to collect community feedback on common challenges you have with drift detection like
- choosing an automatic or manual reconciliation strategy for drift
- what kind of reporting on drift you'd like to see
Andreas Grub
Update — June 2026
A quick note on where we are: the foundational work for drift detection is progressing alongside the dry-run feature, which is closely related. The current cycle (demo on June 17th) delivers the manual dry-run capability and a major overhaul of the building block list and runs view. Indicating detected changes as drift in the UI is not yet included in this cycle.
Automatic drift detection and the ability to define reconciliation policies are planned for the next cycle. We will update this post once we have more to share.
Jelle den Burger
updated the status to
preview
Update — meshStack v2026.30.0
Drift detection and scheduled reconciliation for Building Blocks are now available in Beta!
What's available now:
- Detect drift only:meshStack runs a scheduled dry run (daily or weekly) and records whether the real resource state has drifted from the Building Block's configuration. Detected drift surfaces as a "Review Drift" action in the Building Block list.
- Detect and fix drift:meshStack automatically applies the fix on the same schedule, either held for approval or applied directly.
- Configure both from the Building Block Definition's Policies tabin the Drift Detection & Schedule section.
- Detecting drift (and fixing it with approval) requires the OpenTofu implementation type. Fully automatic fix also works for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Azure DevOps Pipelines Building Blocks.
This feature is currently labeled
Beta
in the Panel. If you have any feedback for us around this new feature, let us know on this post! We'll update this post once it reaches General Availability.Andreas Grub
Update — June 2026
A quick note on where we are: the foundational work for drift detection is progressing alongside the dry-run feature, which is closely related. The current cycle (demo on June 17th) delivers the manual dry-run capability and a major overhaul of the building block list and runs view. Indicating detected changes as drift in the UI is not yet included in this cycle.
Automatic drift detection and the ability to define reconciliation policies are planned for the next cycle. We will update this post once we have more to share.
Jelle den Burger
updated the status to
in progress
We are working on this right now.