[swgillespie]

[Disclosure - I'm a Pulumi employee]

There is a top-level CLI verb called `refresh` that explicitly checks Pulumi's idea of the state of the world against the actual state of the world. If there's a diff, Pulumi reconciles the diff by updating its own state. `pulumi update` does not do this by default, but you can run `pulumi refresh` at any time to verify that your state has not drifted from reality.