In the pulumi docs, I’ve seen “name”, “logical name”, and “resource_name” all used apparently interchangeably (see https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/programming-model/#resources , https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/programming-model/#urns ) which is confusing me and my team when we’re talking about these entities. Is one of these monikers preferred over the others?

You may have already read through this (based on your first link), but https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/programming-model/#autonaming tries to explain this a bit more. In general, "name" and "logical name" refer to the name you've provided to the resource in your pulumi code based on

name

as in this bit of code:

let res = new Resource(name, args, options);

When defined this way, Pulumi will auto-name the physical resource (e.g. the "resource name") appending a random suffix. This is generally helpful for resources that require unique names and is explain in more https://www.pulumi.com/docs/troubleshooting/faq/#why-do-resource-names-have-random-hex-character-suffixes.

ahh, ok, so “name” == “logical name” and “resource name” == “physical name”? I think I’ve gotten myself confused because the first positional argument for pulumi resource constructors in node is

name

( see https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/blob/master/sdk/nodejs/ec2/instance.ts#L259 ) but in python it’s

resource_name

( see https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/blob/master/sdk/python/pulumi_aws/ec2/instance.py#L233 ) which made me reason that

name

==

resource_name

. But I guess that’s not the case?

Ah, that is confusing. Especially in this case, because EC2 instances don't actually have physical names at AWS anyway.