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Have you looked into the pulumi k8s operator? I just learned about it, looks promising, might be what you're looking for??
<https://www.pulumi.com/docs/guides/continuous-delivery/pulumi-kubernetes-operator/|https://www.pulumi.com/docs/guides/continuous-delivery/pulumi-kubernetes-operator/>

that still doesn't provide a way of executing a command in an existing pod.

K, not sure I fully understand, but I'm seeing some stuff online about using ssm and step functions
<https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/running-a-kubernetes-job-in-amazon-eks-on-aws-fargate-using-aws-stepfunctions/|https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/running-a-kubernetes-job-in-amazon-eks-on-aws-fargate-using-aws-stepfunctions/>
<https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/pod-execution-role.html|https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/pod-execution-role.html>

ideally i'd like to replicate `kubectl exec`

I believe you can probably use the `Command` package to do this (using `remote.Command`):

<https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-command>

But my guess is it’s going to feel like there is friction

i was hoping for something that called the actual kuberntes exec api instead of shelling out to a host command