Skipping Intermediate Deployments

By default, when multiple deployments are queued for a stack, Pulumi runs them sequentially until the backlog is cleared. For a stack that receives many pushes in quick succession — for example, a busy shared stack where pull requests merge frequently — this means every intermediate commit gets its own deployment, even though only the final state matters.

With Skip intermediate deployments enabled, whenever a deployment finishes Pulumi skips every queued deployment of the same type except the most recent one, so the stack jumps straight to the latest desired state instead of replaying every commit in between. Because the changes are cumulative, the end result is the same, and you save the deployment minutes and wall-clock time the skipped runs would have consumed.

Enable it from your stack’s deployment settings in the Pulumi Cloud UI, or set operationContext.options.skipIntermediateDeployments to true on the pulumiservice.DeploymentSettings resource.

Keep these trade-offs in mind:

• Only deployments of the same type are consolidated. Skipping applies per operation type (update, preview, destroy, and so on), so a queued destroy is never skipped in favor of an update.
• You lose the per-commit deployment record. Skipped commits do not get their own deployment, so you won’t have an individual update history or preview for each intermediate change.
• The deployment in progress is not interrupted. Skipping consolidates the queued backlog; it does not cancel a deployment that is already running. Stopping a running deployment requires explicitly cancelling it, which is a dangerous operation that can leave the stack in an inconsistent state.