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Or is there a different way to achieve what I want? I deployed into account1, which is correct. Now I want my AWS_PROFILE to point to account2, but my resources are all still in the right place. I have a provider for account1, and if I use it to look things up or create new things, it correctly deals with account1. But if I edit my code to pass in the account1 provider to my acount1 resources, Pulumi spots the difference and wants to replace everything.

Previews can be overly conservative when it comes to changing providers. It’s not always possible to tell if a provider change will cause replacements, so if in doubt, the preview will indicate replacements.

Good tip. In the mean time, I tried groking the state file, and I think I figured it out. I exported, updated all the bits like

"provider": "urn:pulumi:mystack::vpc::pulumi:providers:aws::default_3_2_1::defaultid"

to

"provider": "urn:pulumi:mystack::vpc::pulumi:providers:aws::myprovidername::myproviderid"

, and imported. Looking very good so far...