I'm after some advice... I've got a few situations where we create our own ComponentResource - and it depends on something else that isn't an Output<string>, e.g. a component resource for our deployment of cert-manager (via a Release) depends on the re-injection of a Secret. In these cases I've written code that creates the dependant resource within an Apply() function - but I understand this isn't the best as preview won't see the creation of things within Apply(). What's the general patter to follow to avoid this?

Yeh that's not ideal. Resources created inside apply often won't show at preview time. Is there a reason you can't just use the Output value directly as an Input here?

Typically it's something like this: I create a ComponentResource, within the ctor of that I create other resources. E.g. I created AksCluster and within this class I have Output<ManagedCluster>.

public Output<ManagedCluster> ManagedCluster { get; }

When creating the ManagedCluster instance - I make sure to set the Parent value, so that the Parent of the ManagedCluster is AksCluster:

new CustomResourceOptions() { Parent = this }

Now, later on - I want to create a Helm release, so, I use code like this:

return MyAksCluster.ManagedCluster.Apply(managedCluster => new Release(
            $"{ProjectName}-azure-workload-identity",
            new ReleaseArgs()
            {
                Chart = "workload-identity-webhook",
                Namespace = "azure-workload-identity-system",
                CreateNamespace = true,
                RepositoryOpts = new RepositoryOptsArgs
                {
                    Repo = "<https://azure.github.io/azure-workload-identity/charts>"
                },
                Values = new InputMap<object>()
                {
                    ["azureTenantID"] = tenantId
                },
                SkipAwait = false
            },
            new CustomResourceOptions
            {
                DeleteBeforeReplace = true, DependsOn = managedCluster, Parent = MyAksCluster, Provider = ClusterProvider
            }));

I think your making things harder because that ManagedCluster is in an Output itself. Can you not return a ManagedCluster directly? You could then just use that in the dependsOn list of the Release. But I do agree that dependencies with components isn't great right now, it something we'd like to improve its just tricky because a load of user will be dependent on the current behaviour. Hopefully we can overhaul it to something more useful for 4.0 at least.