Last Tuesday, a CTO called me in tears. Good tears.
“Steve, we just deleted 50% of our platform. Everything runs better.
Our AWS bill dropped £33K/month. Developers are actually… happy?”
The secret? We used pink post-it notes.
Here’s exactly what we did.
THE GREAT PLATFORM PURGE OF 2024
Six months ago, this same CTO was drowning:
- 47 microservices (for 12 developers)
- 8 different ways to deploy
- 3 competing CI/CD systems
- 2 service meshes (yes, two)
- 0 documentation that matched reality
Sound familiar?
Their platform was like a hoarder’s house. Every room packed with “might need it someday” infrastructure.
WHY LEADERS WON'T TOUCH LEGACY
(UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE)
The components that cost the most are often the ones no one will delete.
- "It's been running for 8 years!"
- "The person who built it left!"
- "It might break something!"
Classic case: Insurance company, £40K/month for an Oracle cluster. What was it doing? Serving a dashboard that three people checked quarterly. But it was "mission-critical" because a VP said so in 2016.
The psychology? Leaders who delete working systems get blamed for problems. Leaders who let sleeping systems lie get... promoted.
We finally deleted it by showing:
- £480K annual cost
- 3 users, 12 logins/year
- Same data available in their BI tool
- 10 engineer-hours/month maintenance
Sometimes you need to translate "it works" to "it works but costs £40K per user per year."
THE POST-IT NOTE AUDIT™
Here’s the stupidly simple exercise that changed everything:
Step 1: The Mapping (2 hours)
Print your architecture diagram. Stick a pink post-it on every component.
Step 2: The Reality Check (1 week)
Every time someone uses a component, move its post-it to a green “KEEP” board.
Step 3: The Reckoning
After one week, everything still pink gets questioned. Hard.
Their results:
- 23 components never touched
- 12 used by exactly one service
- 8 duplicating existing functionality
- Only 19 actually critical
Want to see me run this audit live? Next Tuesday’s masterclass, I’ll do a Post-It Audit on a volunteer’s architecture. It’s both terrifying and liberating to watch.
THE 50% RULE
After analysing successful platform simplifications, I found a pattern:
You can delete 50% of any platform over 2 years old.
Not “optimise” or “refactor.” DELETE.
Why 50%? Because platforms grow like cancer:
- “What if” architecture: 20%
- Resume-driven development: 15%
- Vendor-pushed additions: 10%
- Abandoned experiments: 15%
- Duplicate solutions: 10%
- Actually needed: 30%
Do the math. It’s terrifying.
THIS WEEK’S PLATFORM PSYCHOLOGY INSIGHT
The #1 question from last week:
“How do I convince my team to delete things?”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your team is emotionally attached to complexity.
They built it. They learned it. They maintain it. Deleting it feels like admitting failure.
Reframe it: “We’re so good now, we don’t need training wheels anymore.”
One architect told me: “Deleting that custom orchestrator felt like putting down a sick pet. Necessary, but painful. A week later: Why didn’t we do this years ago?”
REAL DELETION STORIES THAT WILL MAKE YOU BRAVE
The Service Mesh No One Missed (Retail client)
Deleted Istio on Friday. Monitored all weekend. Monday came… nothing broke. The “critical” distributed tracing? Two people checked it monthly. Savings: £18K/month
The GitOps That Wasn’t (Financial services)
Removed ArgoCD. Went back to kubectl apply. Deployment time dropped from 15 minutes to 2. Developer quote: “It’s like taking off a weight vest.”
The Multi-Cloud Myth (SaaS startup)
Deleted their entire Azure presence (kept AWS). The “vendor lock-in protection”? Never used. Not once. Savings: £45K/month + 1 full-time engineer
I’ll share even more deletion success stories in Tuesday’s masterclass - including the one that saved £2M annually.
YOUR PLATFORM DELETION CHECKLIST
Before deleting anything, ask:
✓ The Usage Test: Has anyone touched this in 30 days?
✓ The Explanation Test: Can you explain its purpose in one sentence?
✓ The Dependency Test: What breaks if it’s gone?
✓ The Cost Test: What does it cost in money AND complexity?
✓ The Alternative Test: Is there a simpler way?
Score 3 or more “No”s? Delete it.
THE DELETION ROADMAP
Week 1: Run the Post-It Audit
Week 2: Delete development environment components
Week 3: Delete staging components
Week 4: Plan production deletions
Week 5-8: Execute with rollback plans
Pro tip: Start with monitoring tools. You probably have 5 doing the same thing.
YOUR INVITATION: SEE DELETION IN ACTION
Next Tuesday, I’m running a special The Simplicity Test™ Masterclass.
What you’ll experience:
- Live Post-It Audit on real architecture
- The psychology of letting go (why teams resist)
- Safe deletion strategies that won’t break production
- My “Deletion Decision Matrix” template
- Q&A on your specific deletion fears
When: Tuesday 22nd July, 2pm UK / 9am ET
Where: Online (link sent upon registration)
Spots available: Sold out
READER QUESTION: “WON’T DELETING THINGS CAUSE OUTAGES?”
“Steve, I want to simplify, but I’m terrified of breaking production.”
Fair. Here’s the counterintuitive truth: Complex platforms cause MORE outages.
Every component is a failure point. Every integration is a crack. Every abstraction is a lie waiting to break at 2am.
One client tracked it:
- Before deletion: 4.3 incidents/month
- After deleting 50%: 1.2 incidents/month
Simpler systems don’t just cost less. They break less.
In the masterclass, I’ll show you my “Safe Deletion Protocol” - how to delete without drama.
Full confession: I once built a 'scalable' platform for a 10-person startup. Custom orchestration, five monitoring tools, infrastructure-as-code for everything. Cost: £200K. Users: 12. The day I deleted it all and replaced it with Heroku? That's when I truly became a platform engineer.
THE COMPONENTS EVERYONE SHOULD DELETE
Based on 50+ platform audits, these are always safe to delete:
- The “Future-Proof” Service Mesh (You’re not Netflix)
- The Custom CI/CD DSL (Use GitHub Actions)
- The Multi-Cloud Abstraction Layer (Pick one cloud)
- The Elaborate Secret Management System (Use cloud native)
- The Custom Deployment Tool (Helm or Kustomize)
Deleting just these saves the average team £30K/month.
THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE: DELETE ONE THING
I dare you. This week, delete ONE component. Start small:
- That unused monitoring dashboard
- The beta feature flag system
- The “temporary” work-around from 2023
- The staging environment no one uses
- The alerts that always fire false positives
Then bring your deletion story to the masterclass. Best one gets featured in next week’s newsletter.
📢 FROM THE NEWSLETTER TO THE STAGE
I am taking the deletion philosophy on the road!
I'll be at BitSummit Hamburg (Sept 4th) sharing the full story behind our biggest platform transformation - the one that started with pink post-its and ended with GitOps clarity.
"From Console Chaos to GitOps Clarity: A FinTech Transformation Tale"
Newsletter readers get 15% off with code: STEVE_BITSUMMIT
Register: https://bitsummitapp.eventify.io/t2/tickets
See you in Hamburg? Reply and let me know!
WHAT’S COMING NEXT WEEK
Issue #005: “The Meeting Where We Fired Kubernetes” - When to admit K8s is wrong for you - The checklist that saves £500K decisions - Why boring technology is beautiful
Plus: Deletion success stories from this week’s masterclass!
Ready to delete your way to simplicity?
Steve
P.S. Current deletion record from a reader: 73 unused Terraform modules. The git commit message? “Spring cleaning in October.” The result? 80% faster Terraform runs. Can you beat it? Share your story in the masterclass.
P.P.S. That financial services CTO from the opening? They’re now running 6 services, 1 deployment method, 1 CI/CD system. Their platform team went from fighting fires to shipping features. Revenue is up 30% because developers can actually… develop. I’ll walk through their complete deletion journey in the masterclass.
📅 MASTERCLASS NEXT TUESDAY:
The Simplicity Test™ Masterclass
Date: 22nd July, 2pm UK / 9am ET
Topic: Delete Your Way to Platform Excellence
Spots: Sold out