I think this will do what you say you want. I used the dictionary flattening code in this answer with a small modification — I changed it to not concatenate the keys of parent dictionaries with those of the nested ones since that seems to be what you want. This assumes that the keys used in all nested dictionaries are unique from one another, which in my opinion is a weakness of your approach.
You asked for references that could help you: Searching this website for related questions is often a productive way to find solutions to your own problems. This is especially true when what you want to know is something that has probably been asked before (such as how to flatten nested dictionaries).
Also note that I have written the code to closely follow the PEP 8 - Style Guide for Python Code guidelines — which I strongly suggest you read (and start following as well).
import jsondesired = {"os": "Windows","location": "us-east-1"}def read_json_file(file): with open(file) as json_data: return json.load(json_data)def flatten(d): out = {} for key, val in d.items(): if isinstance(val, dict): val = [val] if isinstance(val, list): for subdict in val: deeper = flatten(subdict).items() out.update({key2: val2 for key2, val2 in deeper}) else: out[key] = val return outdef check_drift(desired, config): drift = {} for key, value in desired.items(): if config[key] != value: drift[key] = value return driftif __name__ == '__main__': from pprint import pprint config = flatten(read_json_file('config.json')) print('Current configuration (flattened):') pprint(config, width=40, sort_dicts=False) drift = check_drift(desired, config) print() print('Drift:') pprint(drift, width=40, sort_dicts=False)This is the output it produces:
Current configuration (flattened):{'location': 'us-east-1','type': 't2.large','os': 'Linux','sgid': 'x-1234'}Drift:{'os': 'Windows'}