Which choice best reflects the benefit of immutable infrastructure?

• A. It requires frequent in-place patches.
• B. It increases drift.
• C. It complicates rollback procedures.
• D. It makes drift less likely and ensures reproducible deployments by replacing components rather than modifying them.

Answer: (D)

Immutable infrastructure means you never modify a live component after it’s deployed. Instead, you build a new version from a versioned artifact and replace the old one. This approach keeps environments consistent and reproducible because every deployment uses the exact same artifact and configuration, eliminating drift between environments. If something needs changing or a failure occurs, you roll out a fresh version or revert by redeploying a previous artifact, which is typically straightforward since you’re redeploying a known-good image or package. The other options don’t fit this practice: in-place patches aren’t part of immutable infrastructure, drift is reduced rather than increased, and rollback procedures are generally simpler, not more complicated, when you can swap in a prior, verified version.