what is the best practice for managing provider upgrades/updates? for example, i have google cloud resource that is a network subnet. other resources such as virtual machines rely on this subnet existing. the google cloud provider version has updated and is wanting to delete and recreate the subnet in gcp.

Hey Jeff! Is there a diff / preview that shows why it wants to re-create it? (I'm guessing it's the provider property change), it probably "sees" them as different resources. You might be able to use the

aliases

property to stitch things back together

Yeh provider upgrades in general shouldn't cause resources to replace. Chances are your either doing something that's causing the engine to think it's a whole new provider not just an upgrade, or there's a bug in the provider.