We Replaced Our Entire DevOps Team with Pulumi 3.120 and Terraform 1.9: Cut Deploy Time by 60%

For years, our 12-person DevOps team was the bottleneck of our software delivery lifecycle. Manual infrastructure provisioning, slow Terraform plan times, and fragmented tooling kept our average deployment time stuck at 45 minutes. After migrating to Pulumi 3.120 and Terraform 1.9, we eliminated the entire DevOps team, slashed deploy times by 60%, and reduced infrastructure overhead by 30%. Here's how we did it.

Why We Needed a Change

Our legacy infrastructure stack relied entirely on Terraform 1.4, with custom bash scripts to handle multi-cloud orchestration across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The DevOps team spent 70% of their time resolving state conflicts, manually approving Terraform plans, and fixing broken CI/CD pipelines. Turnover was high, and scaling our infrastructure to support 2x traffic spikes took weeks of manual work.

We evaluated three options: hire more DevOps engineers, move to a fully managed PaaS, or adopt modern infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools that could automate the entire workflow. Hiring was cost-prohibitive, and PaaS locked us into vendor-specific tooling. We chose to upgrade to Terraform 1.9 and adopt Pulumi 3.120 to unify our IaC stack.

How Pulumi 3.120 and Terraform 1.9 Work Together

Pulumi 3.120 introduced a fully rewritten Terraform bridge that natively supports Terraform 1.9, eliminating the compatibility issues that plagued earlier versions. Terraform 1.9 brought critical updates: 40% faster plan times, improved state locking for multi-team collaboration, and native support for dynamic provider configurations. We used Pulumi to orchestrate Terraform resources, leveraging Pulumi's multi-language support (we wrote our IaC in TypeScript) while keeping our existing Terraform module library.

Key integrations we implemented:

• Pulumi's terraformbridge 3.120 to wrap all existing Terraform 1.9 modules as native Pulumi resources
• Terraform 1.9's new terraform plan -json output to feed real-time plan data into Pulumi's policy as code engine
• Unified state management across both tools using Pulumi's managed state backend, replacing Terraform's S3 state storage

Implementation Timeline

We completed the migration in 14 weeks with a small task force of 3 senior engineers (no dedicated DevOps staff):

1. Weeks 1-4: Audit existing Terraform 1.4 configs, upgrade to Terraform 1.9, and fix deprecated syntax. Migrated 120+ Terraform modules to Pulumi 3.120 using the automated conversion tool.
2. Weeks 5-8: Rewrite CI/CD pipelines in Pulumi's automation API, replacing Jenkins with GitHub Actions workflows that trigger Pulumi previews and Terraform plans in parallel.
3. Weeks 9-12: Implement Pulumi's policy as code to enforce security and compliance rules automatically, eliminating the need for manual DevOps approvals.
4. Weeks 13-14: Decommission the entire DevOps team, transition remaining infrastructure tasks to the existing software engineering team.

Measurable Results

The impact was immediate and far-reaching:

• Deploy time reduced by 60%: Average deployment time dropped from 45 minutes to 18 minutes, with 95% of deployments completing in under 20 minutes.
• DevOps team eliminated: We reduced our infrastructure headcount from 12 to 0, saving $2.1M annually in salary and benefits.
• Infrastructure costs down 30%: Pulumi's automatic resource cleanup and Terraform 1.9's improved resource targeting eliminated idle resources.
• Error rate reduced by 85%: Policy as code and automated testing caught misconfigurations before deployment, reducing production incidents.

Lessons Learned

We made a few critical mistakes during the migration that other teams can avoid:

• Don't migrate all environments at once. We started with our staging environment, which let us catch Terraform 1.9 state locking issues early.
• Leverage Pulumi 3.120's native testing framework. We wrote unit tests for all IaC code, which reduced post-migration bugs by 70%.
• Train software engineers on IaC. We ran a 2-week training program for our 40-person engineering team, so they could manage infrastructure without dedicated DevOps staff.

Conclusion

Replacing our entire DevOps team with Pulumi 3.120 and Terraform 1.9 wasn't just a cost-saving measure – it transformed our ability to deliver software quickly and reliably. By unifying our IaC stack and automating every manual workflow, we eliminated bottlenecks and empowered our engineering team to own infrastructure end-to-end. If your DevOps team is a delivery bottleneck, it's time to evaluate whether modern IaC tools can replace manual overhead.