IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Tell me about a time you responded to a production incident caused by infrastructure configuration drift. What steps did you take to identify the drift, mitigate impact, and prevent recurrence?
DevOps Engineer
General

Sample Answer

We had an outage where latency spiked 5x for a critical service used by ~200k daily users. I led the initial triage with two SREs and noticed autoscaling groups were running wrong instance types after an ad-hoc manual change. I rolled back to the last known-good Terraform state within 18 minutes, shrinking latency back to normal and avoiding an estimated $30k/day revenue hit. Post-mortem, I added drift detection with periodic 'terraform plan' checks, enforced PR-only infra changes, and implemented CI gating that rejected manual console edits by reconciling on a 15-minute schedule. Over three months drift alerts fell to zero and emergency interventions dropped by 85%.

Keywords

Fast identification using drift between live and Terraform stateMitigation: quick rollback to known-good state reduced latency within 18 minutesPreventive changes: automated drift detection, PR-only changes, CI reconciliationOutcome: emergency interventions down 85% and avoided ~$30k/day loss
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