Upgrade bundled Pulumi SDK from v3.215.0 to v3.225.0+ for journaling performance gains

[kevupton]

Problem

SST currently bundles Pulumi v3.215.0 (confirmed in v4.5.1 through v4.9.2 — all ship the same version). For large stacks (1,000+ resources), sst deploy and sst refresh are extremely slow because Pulumi must reconcile every resource against AWS state.

Pulumi v3.225.0 (released March 2026) introduced journaling as a GA feature, which provides up to 20x faster operations for large stacks by batching state updates and reducing snapshot upload overhead.

Context

• Our monorepo has ~1,000 Pulumi resources (30+ services, 28 API Gateways, 80+ secrets, 26 DynamoDB tables, 35 Lambda layers)
• sst refresh --dev takes ~1 hour
• sst deploy takes ~55 minutes
• Verified via strings on the compiled sst binary that all current SST versions (4.5.1, 4.8.0, 4.9.2) embed github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3@v3.215.0

Request

Bump the Pulumi SDK dependency from v3.215.0 to v3.225.0+ to unlock journaling and the associated performance improvements.

References

• Pulumi Journaling GA blog post
• Pulumi v3.225.0 release

[vimtor]

do you know if journaling can be useful with our custom setup? the last time i checked it was only compatible with pulumi cloud

[jasonrowsell]

Pulumi journaling isn't supported for BYOB, I've raised an issue (and solution) with them and in their Slack but I've had no response from the team pulumi/pulumi#22075

I'm also currently migrating a monorepo from SST v2 to v4. ~40+ services, queues tables, buckets etc. Here's what's worked for me:

• Single lambdalith per service (separate functions for anything event driven)
• Micro-stacks

A fresh deploy still takes a while for us. Your refresh might be taking a while due to tables, and buckets. If your tables and code are isolated to their own services and the architecture is event driven, maybe consider micro-stacks