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Check if this helps https://www.pulumi.com/blog/adopting-existing-cloud-resources-into-pulumi/

Did you already read about the

import

resource option that allows to specify the id/arn of an existing entity? together with a

pulumi up

this will show you which resources are adopted to the stack instead of creating new ones.

Ah, thanks a lot, both of you! 🙂 So the decision whether to import or not is pushed to the program, interesting. Will play around with that.

I'm getting started with Pulumi and have been moving objects around inside my program and importing/reimporting them a lot. During this time, it would be nice to have options for alias-if-exists and import-if-exists so I don't need to redefine aliases as I move objects around or set the import option on all nested objects. The import-if-exists decision is easy for simple objects where the import id is the same as the name but the concept may fall apart as the decision gets more complex. There is some WIP for real-time translations prior to registering a resource so I'll take a look at that when ready. Until then, I wanted to share this concept in case others were thinking about something similar.