Scenario: I am running an AWS autoscaling group (ASG), and I have changed the associated launch configuration during terraform apply. The ASG stays unaffected.
This isn't an answer per se, but I struggled with this as well. In one context it was general, in another, Kubernetes.
I ended up writing an open-source service to watch and auto-rolling update. It should solve this, but it is new, more than happy to get feedback/issues/PRs on it.
https://github.com/deitch/aws-asg-roller