Platform & DevOps·Infrastructure described in a file
a nightly job plans against production and tells you that fourteen things no longer match the code, before the next deploy does.
Drift detection
Also calleddrift check, scheduled plan
Running the comparison on a schedule purely to report divergence, without applying anything. It converts drift from a surprise discovered during an unrelated change into a routine signal, which is the whole point. It is also a useful security control, since an unexpected difference in a security group or a role is exactly what an unauthorised change looks like.