Configuration drift—like a temporary security rule left open or an unlogged manual fix—can quietly snowball into outages and security gaps. A new lightweight Config Drift Detector tackles this by taking regular infrastructure snapshots, comparing them to a baseline, and surfacing changes in a Next.js dashboard.

The architecture uses serverless AWS Lambda functions for scheduling, snapshotting, and detection. Raw data flows to S3 for durability, while a PostgreSQL database stores metadata for fast queries. Slack alerts notify teams of high or critical drifts, keeping noise low while providing fast feedback on risky changes.

The design prioritizes operational clarity over complexity, focusing on EC2 instances and security groups. It aims for an SRE-friendly UI that answers key questions: what changed, where, and when? Future extensions could include better diff views, multi-cloud support, and automated remediation hooks for common drift patterns.