Hey Will - welcome, and thanks for the great feedback! On local testing, we're definitely interested in doing more here. One of the nice benefits of building abstractions using Pulumi over top of your cloud resources and then deploying applications authored in terms of those is that the abstractions can be easier to mock and test. We actually had the beginning of a mock layer for

@pulumi/cloud

, which did exactly that - but it had fallen a bit behind so we recently removed it - we're fully expecting to bring something back here in the future - either based on something like

localstack

, or running against a local Kubernetes cluster. But more importantly, you can always build your own abstractions that are mockable for your own workloads. Definitely interested in exploring this more if you have more thoughts after spending some time using Pulumi. Definitely hear the feedback on the central service for storing stack state. We're thinking a lot about how best to offer additional options here. Would love to do a deeper dive with you on what requirements you expect the clients you work with would have, and how we could meet those requirements while still providing a robust-by-default experience for users.