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I've been trying to find a decent description of this but couldn't find it anywhere. What is the difference between the "classic" and "native" version of plugins?

Classic is (usually?) bridged Terraform: it uses Terraform's schema as a logical starting point, and re-implements the same stuff.

Native uses a cloud provider's "generic" and "auto-discoverable" APIs.

When a new feature is released by a cloud provider, hopefully both their APIs (the resource-specific one, and the "auto-discoverable" one) are released at the same time. So Pulumi just needs to point their code-generating magic at the provider's start point, and run. New version is released.

But for the classic versions, first Terraform has to update their SDK, presumably using the resource-specific API. Then Pulumi can point their code-generating magic at that. And then, new version released.

So one extra step, and it's a step that can take quite a while.

Flip side is, at least for AWS, the auto-discoverable API (Cloud Control, iirc?) isn't fully featured yet, and doesn't seem to be updated as fast as the resource-specific APIs. Which is a little disappointing... :(

Yep Cloud Control: <https://aws.amazon.com/cloudcontrolapi/>

Thank you, this was very insightful. I was hoping to use GCP Native but I ran into issues since the import is not fully working yet