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

<@UDAP6PRRT> try this instead:

```
apiIntentRobotServiceAccount.metadata.apply(m =&gt; m.name)
```

`get` does something else. `.apply` is the method you want.

is there documentation on this somewhere? I’m surprised that `get` doesn’t give me the resource

followup question <@UBAJ7TD53>: I created the resources in my paste first through yaml and applied them. Now i’m trying to move the resources to pulumi and the preview is showing that they all need to be created. is that expected behavior?

<@UDAP6PRRT> yes, these docs are generated from the typescript comments: <https://pulumi.io/reference/pkg/nodejs/@pulumi/pulumi/index.html#method-get>

There's some light conceptual docs on this here <https://pulumi.io/reference/programming-model.html#outputs>.  But more is definitely needed.  /cc also <@UB9JVTW07>.

So if you are using vscode or something like that, hovering  over `get` should tell you what the method does.

<@UDAP6PRRT> I’m not sure I understand your follow-up question?

Have you created those resources in Pulumi?

If you haven’t run `pulumi up` before, the preview is going to tell you that it’s going to create those resources.

ah gotcha, even if those resources already exist pre-pulumi? I’ve already written and applied a k8s yaml spec with a service account, role and rolebinding. Now I’m moving this yaml to pulumi and it seems that `preview` isn’t seeing what I’ve already applied

Pulumi will not know about them if you didn’t create them with Pulumi

You can use `k8s.core.v1.ServiceAccount.get('api-intent-robot')` to reference resources that already exist.

<@UDAP6PRRT> since this a common pattern I actually added a utility function to our library few days ago. 

```
apiIntentRobotServiceAccount.metadata.apply(m =&gt; m.name)
```
you can just write:

```
import { getName} from '@solvvy/pulumi-util';

getName(apiIntentRobotServiceAccount);
```

:slightly_smiling_face: