Another tricky question, lets say I have a platform with a bunch of different components I need installed. I'm using Pulumi Automation API to create a kubernetes cluster and install all the helm charts and yaml needed. What if I want the option of installing the full platform or just individual components at a time? Is there a good way to reconcile that? Create a stack for each one?

Not sure if this helps because it isn't full AKS. Using Azure Container Apps, we have a parent stack that stands up ACA and other things that take more time. Then separate stacks to deploy the applications but since we're using automation-api, deploying an appstack has a programmatic dependency on its parent stack. Pulumi Dungeon has a good example of using automation-api to automate that stack dependency https://github.com/gitfool/Pulumi.Dungeon

@curved-morning-41391 If there’s a need for different components to have different lifecycles (i.e., be deployed/torn down separately or independently), then yes, put them in a separate stack. This blog post provides some guidelines and considerations around structuring projects/stacks: https://www.pulumi.com/blog/iac-recommended-practices-structuring-pulumi-projects/