Could anyone share a few benchmarks for how long it takes to create AWS resources... for instance an RDS instance, ECS cluster, or VPC?

I don't have any bench marks for you but in my experience RDS instance takes 20-30 minutes. It's definitely one of the slow ones. ECS cluster is very quick, like a couple minutes maybe. Unfortunately don't have any experience provisioning VPC as we manage that outside pulumi.

VPC and heavy weight stuff takes long.. ECS tasks that are underprovisioned take forever as well. I also noticed how much faster is to run pulumi (or terraform) from the same region as the resources, because after all it's all api (i/o) calls.

thanks, that's helpful