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During the preview stage it refreshes the state So the diff is not against the last deployed state but the last known state, the one acquired during the preview

Manual changes are kind of a no-no when doing Infrastructure as Code 😉

You can also tell Pulumi to not refresh the state, it's not recommended, but you can. That will still overwrite your manual changes once you change any other field on the Pulumi resource, since it will reapply it all

Avoid manual changes 🙂

And that can also break you deployment since some resources on Pulumi maps to more than one resource on the target. Don't know specifics of AWS and Azure, but on GCP for example you don't send your new DNS records, you send the diff as delete and insert operations. If you don't know the current state your diff will be invalid

Wow, thank you all so much for the clear and fast answers! I definitely want to encourage IaC in our startup and therefore I guess it’s just a good “punishment” if people were to manually make changes.

When you do, they will never go back

Just to clarify, Pulumi does not automatically refresh the state during a

preview

or

up

. You can instruct Pulumi to do this using the

--refresh

flag, but it does not do it by default.

True, Terraform is opt-out of refreshing before planning, Pulumi is opt-in. Sorry

Thanks for the clarifications! 🙂