This is all an XY Problem though, the root problem is: I have a helm chart (ugh) that sometimes hangs (double ugh!) when I try to Pulumi deploy it, and when it hangs it doesn't serialize the state and checkpoints back. This then puts me in a really bad state because I have a bunch of dangling resources that I can't import correctly. How do I handle this?

I think the Recovering from an Interrupted Update + Manually Editing Your Deployment sections might be helpful here: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/troubleshooting/#interrupted-update-recovery

I think that ends up being a huge amount of work, when what I really want is behavior like: "Oh, this resource is already deployed with the right namespace and name? Okay, I'll import it automatically!"

I hear ya. I think folks have hit this same issue but perhaps want a different outcome behavior? https://pulumi-community.slack.com/archives/C84L4E3N1/p1587207659355600 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/4265 Feel free to upvote if that's in line with what you'd like to see, or open up an issue if it's not.

@orange-policeman-59119 just to check - are you using the Pulumi service backend of a cloud storage (blob) backend?

it hangs and doesn’t serialized the checkpoint

This should never happen. I’d love to understand exactly what is causing this for you.

Cloud storage (blob) backend

Yeah - there have been many reports on this recently. Appears something changed in the GCS side recently. Discussing how to address that for Pulumi at https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/4258. I would guess that is the root of the problems here