The main thing to know is that when referencing outputs from resources, Pulumi will take care of "materializing" them when passed into other Pulumi resources. But when trying to print them or do other things with them you need to "force" this.

That's the very high-level explanation. This is explained in more detail at https://pulumi.io/reference/programming-model.html#outputs and specifically the

.apply(...)

method is likely what you want to use in this case.

i'll try the apply thing

ah, ic, so its behaving like this, because even though I'm using it inside the resource you need to use the apply thing to transform it, because all the others do not need transforming. geesh

thanks!