Pings

If you assume that systems stay as-installed, you will have a bad time. Drift starts with the first emergency change and never really stops. The question is not whether drift exists, but whether you can see it.

Most organisations try to enforce rules on systems they don’t really see. You can’t govern what you don’t understand. Telemetry comes first, then models, then rules – in that order.

Documentation does not describe what is. It describes what somebody believed was true at the time of writing. The longer the distance in time, the more you should treat it as an opinion, not as fact.

You can use the same pipeline, the same artifacts and the same scripts. The environments will still diverge over time – through permissions, data, hotfixes and operational shortcuts. Reproducibility is the goal, not equality.

Defaults are not “just” fallback values. They are production behaviour for every place where nobody made an explicit decision. Ignoring defaults is ignoring a big part of your real system design.

Most CMDBs are not “wrong” in the malicious sense. They are simply late. By the time information arrives there, the systems have already moved on. Treat the CMDB as a hint, not as a source of truth.

Most configuration doesn’t live where people think it lives. What the system actually uses at runtime is the only truth.