No matter how you like to participate in developer communities, Pulumi wants to meet you there. If you want to meet other Pulumi users to share use-cases and best practices, contribute code or documentation, see us at an event, or just tell a story about something cool you did with Pulumi, you are part of our community.

Pulumi Community

That may be because it can't tell what's in the new user data because it's generated in an apply, or similar. If that's the case, then it'll report a diff during preview, but (assuming tha there really is no difference) the diff will be 0 during up, and the instance won't be recreated.

If you want to test this, you can removed all EC2 write privileges from the creds that Pulumi is using, then run `pulumi up`. The user data will be fully generated and you'll be able to tell if the user data really has change, and you're also protected from accidentally destroying the instance in the case where the user data has changed.