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Understanding immutable history in Infrahub

At its foundation, Infrahub implements data immutability—a principle where information in the database cannot be deleted or modified in place. Instead, every change creates a new version while preserving all previous states. This approach mirrors version control systems like Git, providing a robust history of all infrastructure changes.

This architectural decision provides several critical benefits for infrastructure management:

  • Complete audit trail: Every modification is permanently recorded with who, what, and when, providing full traceability
  • Time travel queries: Access the exact state of your infrastructure at any point in history to understand past configurations
  • Risk-free rollbacks: Return to any previous state without data loss when issues are detected
  • Compliance and forensics: Meet regulatory requirements with immutable change history for audits
  • Parallel workflows: Enable multiple teams to work on infrastructure changes simultaneously using branches
  • Change verification: Review proposed changes before committing them to production environments

Use cases​

Immutable history in Infrahub supports several crucial infrastructure management scenarios:

  • Historical analysis: View how your infrastructure looked at a specific point in time to troubleshoot issues or understand past decisions
  • Compliance auditing: Extract all changes performed within a specific time frame for regulatory compliance
  • Change impact assessment: Compare infrastructure states before and after significant changes
  • Security investigation: Trace unauthorized or unexpected changes to their source
  • Knowledge preservation: Understand why specific configuration decisions were made, even as team members change

Core concepts​

Timestamps and commits​

Every change in Infrahub is organized into commits, each with an immutable timestamp. These commits capture:

  • The specific data that changed
  • Who made the change
  • When the change occurred

This approach ensures a complete and coherent historical record that can never be rewritten or deleted.

Temporal queries​

Infrahub's temporal query system allows you to retrieve data from any point in time. When you query the database, you're not just accessing current data—you're accessing a specific moment in the database's history. By default, queries return the latest state, but you can specify any timestamp to see exactly how your infrastructure looked at that moment.

This capability extends across all interfaces:

  • Web UI: Time navigation controls in the interface
  • GraphQL API: Timestamp parameters for historical queries
  • REST API: Temporal query support for retrieving historical data
  • Python SDK: Time-aware methods to access past states

Attribute-level change tracking​

Unlike systems that capture entire object snapshots, Infrahub's immutable history operates at the attribute level. This approach offers several advantages:

  • Storage efficiency: Only changed values are stored, not entire object copies
  • Change clarity: Easier identification of exactly what changed in each commit
  • Performance optimization: Faster queries and better scalability with large datasets

Implementation details​

There is a timestamp associated with every change in the database. This timestamp is immutable and cannot be changed or deleted. Every query to the database can be associated with a timestamp, allowing you to see the state of the database at that specific point in time.