Primitives

Foundational data types and concepts that appear across the engine, every SDK, and the gRPC protocol. Understanding these is a prerequisite for understanding any single subsystem.

Sub-pages

• Resources and URNs — the identity and state model.
• Inputs and Outputs — the future-like type and dataflow model.

Active contributors

Active contributors: Ian Wahbe, Justin Van Patten, Thomas Gummerer, Fraser Waters

Why these qualify as primitives

URNs, resources, inputs, and outputs appear in:

• The protobuf (proto/pulumi/resource.proto, proto/pulumi/alias.proto, proto/pulumi/asset.proto) — wire format.
• The engine (pkg/resource/deploy/, sdk/go/common/resource/) — internal model.
• Every SDK (sdk/go/pulumi/, sdk/nodejs/, sdk/python/lib/pulumi/) — user-facing type.
• The CLI (pulumi state, pulumi import) — surface.

A change to any of these has cross-cutting impact and warrants careful review.

See also

• Glossary for one-line definitions.
• Resource graph & step model for the deployment-side mechanics.