👋 hi all! new to Pulumi, very much enjoying it so far. I had a quick question - my understanding of inputs and outputs is that they should be fairly interchangeable (eg an

Output

can be an

Input

to some other resource). In particular, I was testing creating a VPC with pre-existing IPs (eg IPs that are allowlisted for various things far outside of my control)

var allocatedIps = new List<Eip> 
{
  Eip.Get(...)
  ...
}

var eksVpc = new Ec2.Vpc("eks-vpc", new()
{
  ...
  NatGateways = new Ec2.Inputs.NatGatewayConfigurationArgs
  { 
    Strategy = Ec2.NatGatewayStrategy.OnePerAz,
    ElasticIpAllocationIds = allocatedIps.Select(x => (Input<string>) x.AllocationId).ToList()
  }
}

This feels very weird, but it works. Is there a better way? Am I missing something?

Maybe something like...

var eips = Output.Create(GetEips.InvokeAsync(new GetEipsArgs

{

Filters = new List<GetEipsFilterArgs>()

})).Apply(result =>

{

//shape result

return new List<string>();

});

it feels a little weird that these don’t return outputs to begin with

GetEips returns GetEipsResult.

yeah, i mean, i get that. this feels like a lot of verbose type conversions to say something that is easily expressible in terraform - versus just being able to use the output of

InvokeAsync

directly with whatever expects it. the differentiation between “output that might eventually return” (eg creation of a vpc, whatever) and “output that returns immediately” (get me a list of vpcs) especially with a lack of explicit casting feels fairly unergonomic

like

ElasticIpAllocationIds = eips2.Apply(e => e.AllocationIds);

?

well, or really

ElasticIpAllocationIds = GetEips.InvokeAsync(…)