What's the proper / best way to prevent resources from being destroyed that i want to toggle their deployment based on a configuration boolean... Basically trying to say "only deploy to the -dev or -production api's if i've explicitly set a variable in the conf to do so". Another example was i had

"if servers < desired { // deploy ec2}"

With the issue being on the second run pulumi would see we didn't define the first set of ec2's and go "oh well i should destroy those". My issue was that i was generating unique values for the ec2, storing it in the userdata, and then also saving those off to a DB... So even using

protect

or

ignoreChanges

it was (is) a pain to try and avoid re-generating / saving new values into the DB and required all sorts of shims and "clever"(breaks if you breathe on it) code. I don't currently have an idea about the api and would like to do it the "right" way

You can use Pulumi stacks to drive the different environments via the stack-specific configuration file. The ideas is that you have a project (i.e. the code) and then you instantiate different stacks for the different environments. So, in your “dev” config file you would have

num_desired_servers

set to 1 or whatever and in the “prod” config file this would be set to 5 or whatever. Pulumi then manages the stacks separately.

somehow i missed the stack referencing ( i was avoiding doing multiple stacks since it seemed like a pain to get the names of my DB's etc. into my other stacks etc. 🤦 ) However i'm not sure this would help for the server example... For that, i wanted to be able to say start a stack with say

num_desired_servers = 1

and then scale it up on another "up" command later to maybe 3.

I also wanted to be able to scale down as well.

I would just use

protect

but it seemed tedious to me to have to unprotect the servers to be able to destroy the stack

in hindsight it probably wouldn't have been that big of a deal

This sort of code:

const instanceCount = config.getNumber("instanceCount");
for (let i = 0; i < instanceCount; i++) {
   // Create servers here
}

If the config file for, say the staging stack, has

instanceCount

set to, say, 2, this code will create 2 servers. Then later, if the config for staging is changed so that

instanceCount

is now set to, say, 3, Pulumi will create 1 more server and leave the original 2 servers as-is.