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you should only leave them there if the resource is in the middle of creating and hasn't completed yet. Ultimately, the way to fix pending_operations is to remove them from your state

But that isn't what the online documentation says? "If the operation was successful, and a resource was created, you should delete that resource using your cloud provider's console, CLI, or SDK."

if you end up with pending operations, you need to do the following: • check the resource exists in AWS • check your pulumi state to see if the resource exists there if the two match, remove the pending operation if the two do not match, make them match (either by removing the AWS resource to match the state, or very rarely modifying the state to match the AWS resource) and then remove the pending operation

Thanks! I think the most confusing part is what I mentioned in the start, the instructions in the docs and "pulumi up" doesn't seem to match, at least not for a novice. To clear things up, I have assumed that a "create" operation in pending_operations is not included in the State yet, correct? So that would mean that the normal route would be to remove those resources from AWS (if they have been created at all) and then remove them from pending_operations. That is how I read the online documentations, but the "remove from cloud provider" part is not at all mentioned in the instructions outputed from "pulumi up".

it sounds like we can definitely make some improvements here, I'll file an issue for this, appreciate the feedback!

Thanks @echoing-dinner-19531 for the link. I had already read through all the posts before asking here and one of the reasons is that many of the comments on "this is how I do it" simply involves cleaning out the pending_operations and not checking for orphaned resources on AWS.