If you want to manage the Vpc in Pulumi (equivalent to a

resource

in Terraform, then you must import the VPC.

And half-way between those options is

Vpc.get()

, which is similar to

getVpc

but uses the normal Pulumi classes. It's read-only though, so similar to a

data

.

I would suggest not trying to simulate anything Terraform-y. You will need a new mental model, as Terraform and Pulumi require fairly different ways of thinking.

I’m not really trying to simulate anything in Terraform, I said “simulate” just to convey the goal: get a reference to a resource and use it, without Pulumi controlling or creating that resource.

It’s very clear to me that Pulumi’s lifecycle is a different way of thinking about things than normal code… but it is in fact close to how Terraform does things (though that may not be apparent to some from looking at .hcl code which almost looks procedural).