Under the hood, Pulumi is a desired state engine. This means that you tell Pulumi what you want, Pulumi knows what already exists, and it makes targeted changes to match the state of the world with your desired state. This works great as long as Pulumi understands the state of the world, which it nearly always does. We will discuss how pulumi refresh can be used to bring Pulumi’s state back inline with external state.
As of 3.23.0, users can disable the default provider with Pulumi. So what does this mean for you? If you’ve been using Pulumi for a bit, you’ll have encountered provider resources, which are how we abstract the global state of a cloud provider. All resources have an associated provider. If no provider is supplied in the user’s code, a default provider is created to serve the resource. Explicit providers, which are defined by the user in code, allow programmatic and dynamic control of how a resource deploys into a cloud.
