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Is there an HPA involved?

I think _generally_ you would want your scaling to be dynamic, not driven by pulumi

You might need to do a `pulumi refresh` first, so that the pulumi state is updated based on changes in k8s

<@U04E2D27NF5> HPA is not involved in this example. Scaling in general should be involved. This was just one specific case under special circumstances.
<@U04D2DBKUF9> I tried `pulumi refresh` and network and cluster changes were detected, but no pod count changes. I have applied `pulumi refresh` but `pulumi up`  is still not detecting the changes.

hmm. I'm not sure if Pulumi tries to do drift detection for the Helm Release resource, then.
I think if you were to do the same deploy using helm cli, it also won't update the replicaCount in this case

I think you are running into one of the limitations described here, <@U05LDQYQZL4> :
<https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/kubernetes/how-to-guides/choosing-the-right-helm-resource-for-your-use-case/#helm-release-resource>

Some creativity is likely needed. I have never tried this, but one thing you could try is using pulumi.Command.local to run kubectl get pods, parse and count them, then maybe do a .apply on the output then continue defining pulumi stuff within that apply function based on that output.

And thats if you are able to get the and parse the stdout of a localCommand.
<https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/command/api-docs/local/command/>

you can also get the name of pod release resources from the Release object if you care about those

Thank you all for responses. The main purpose was to check if there is some mechanism on Pulumi side designed for this purpose. I have concluded from your answers that there is no such mechanism.

A key take away is that Pulumi’s helm release is no different from running helm install.
If no such mechanism exists naturally in helm, then it wouldn’t in Pulumi….not without a little resource-list-grepping  creativity.