i understand that generally speaking... typescript is the preferred language for pulumi. however i would also like to see some hard performance test comparison to confirm the relative execution speeds of each option. before finally deciding which one to use myself

There isn't a comparison on speed, no. However I do think each language is extremely fast in general, especially when compared to ansible

if you want to, you can import the group_vars and template functionality from the ansible codebase, and then they will both be equally slow 🙂

i find most the time when using python that I am waiting on resources to enter a ready state rather than the code to execute, i.e, waiting on aws to finish starting an instance for example