Now GA: Up to 20x Faster Pulumi Operations for Everyone

In January, we introduced a major performance enhancement for Pulumi Cloud through a fundamental change to how Pulumi manages state that speeds up operations by up to 20x. After a staged rollout across many organizations, it is now enabled by default for every Pulumi Cloud operation. No opt-in required—just use Pulumi CLI v3.225.0+ with Pulumi Cloud. The improvement applies to pulumi up, pulumi destroy, and pulumi refresh; pulumi preview does not modify state, so it is unchanged.

What this means for you

First and foremost, nothing about how you work with pulumi needs to change. Your updates now benefit from better parallelism and should thus complete faster. Before this change, pulumi always saved a full snapshot to the cloud, so the current state could always be recovered if something goes wrong. With journaling, we now only send the state of each operation, which allows us to send these updates in parallel, as long as resources are not related to each other. For the full deep dive, see the blog post linked above.

Production results

Since January, we’ve had many early adopters of journaling. This helped us shake out one final bug on the server side, and journaling has been stable since then. With that we feel confident in rolling this out to all our users.

We’ve also gathered some real-world data on how journaling is performing. Unfortunately this data is quite noisy. Many updates, especially on smaller stacks are dominated by the time it takes to update Cloud resources, rather than the time pulumi takes.

Regardless, the data we do have shows some significant improvements for update times. For stacks with fewer than 100 resources, the median improvement is 25.3%, while the p90 improvement is 75.2%, and we’ve seen a p99 improvement of up to 92.6% Meanwhile, for larger stacks, the median improvement is 60.2%. Unfortunately we don’t have as many stacks with more than 100 resources yet, so the p90 time there is not very significant.

This data already shows the expected significant improvement in update times, especially for larger stacks, though the improvements strongly depend on the shape and type of resources that are being set up. Stacks with many resources, that are quick to update benefit more than smaller stacks with slower to set up resources. For more numbers see also the Benchmarks section in the previous blog post

What you need to do

While this was an opt-in process using the PULUMI_ENABLE_JOURNALING environment variable, this opt-in is no longer required. Just upgrade your Pulumi CLI to v3.225.0+ and use the Pulumi Cloud backend, and journaling will automatically speed up your updates.

If you encounter any issues, reach out on the Pulumi Community Slack or through Pulumi Support. You can also set the PULUMI_DISABLE_JOURNALING=true env variable to opt out of journaling.