At 3:42 PM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our 6-person platform team hit a breaking point: a routine Terraform 1.8 apply for our 142-resource AWS staging environment took 14 minutes and 22 seconds, failed 3 times due to state lock contention, and left us staring at a blinking cursor while our product team waited for a critical feature toggle. Two months later, that same apply takes 6 minutes and 54 seconds, has a 99.8% success rate, and we haven’t seen a state lock error since we migrated to Pulumi 3.120. This is the definitive, benchmark-backed account of why we switched, how we did it, and the hard numbers you won’t find in vendor marketing sheets. 🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats ⭐ hashicorp/terraform — 48,274 stars, 10,326 forks Data pulled live from GitHub and npm. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now GTFOBins (76 points) Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 (309 points) Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal (853 points) Is my blue your blue?…