My Terraform Drift Pipeline Fixed the Change, Then Forgot It

My Terraform drift pipeline could detect a manual EC2 tag change, classify it as LOW, and run Terraform to remove it. Then the pipeline moved on. The evidence existed, but it was spread across CodeBuild output, Lambda logs, and an SNS message. If I wanted to know what changed, how it was classified, and whether remediation started, I had to reconstruct the event from multiple AWS services. The pipeline could act on drift. It could not remember drift. Phase 4 added that memory: a durable DynamoDB record, a read only API, and a small dashboard that turns the event history into something I can inspect without opening three AWS consoles. The Stack Terraform drift event ↓ SNS ↓ Severity Lambda ├── classifies HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW ├── starts remediation for eligible LOW drift └── writes the audit event to DynamoDB ↓ API Gateway HTTP API ↓ Read only Lambda ↓ DynamoDB Query ↓ CloudFront → static dashboard ↑ private S3 bucket The browser receives static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from CloudFront. JavaScript calls API Gateway, the API Lambda queries DynamoDB, and the returned JSON becomes the live dashboard. There is no EC2 web server and no application process running continuously. Step 1: Store Every Classified Event I created a DynamoDB table with a composite key: resource "aws_dynamodb_table" "drift_events" { name = "terraform-drift-events" billing_mode = "PAY_PER_REQUEST" hash_key = "project" range_key = "timestamp" attribute { name = "project" type = "S" } attribute { name = "timestamp" type = "S" } } project groups the history for one Terraform project. The ISO 8601 timestamp orders its events. DynamoDB only requires attribute definitions for keys and indexes. Fields such as high_count , changes , and status still belong in each item, but they do not belong in the table schema block. I passed the table name into the existing severity Lambda instead of putting it directly in the code: environment { variables = { DRIFT_EVENTS_TABLE = aws_dynamodb_table . drift_events . name