I set up my stacks to use an S3 bucket for storing state rather than deploying with Pulumi Cloud and I am finding that it is taking several times longer to deploy. One api went from 8 minutes to 40, another has been deploying for an hour and a half now, and normally takes maybe 20 minutes. Is this normal, and is there anything I can do to improve the deployment speed? It seems like it must have something to do with the bucket or how Pulumi works with each backend, because it is the exact same code. I tried messing around with parallelism but is didn’t make any difference.

Do these stacks have a lot of resources? We've seen some performance issues related to total resource count per stack, and while both backends have this issue it does vary on latency/bandwidth to the backend so might be you had a better connection to the SASS then you do your S3 bucket.