Cutting our stack in half didn’t cause outages, incidents, or panic.
It caused silence. And that was the most unsettling part.
The moment we stopped pretending
Everyone tells you this is how outages happen.
You remove one “small” DevOps tool.
Then another.
Then suddenly you’re on a call explaining to leadership why prod is on fire and why “simplifying” felt like a good idea at the time.
That’s the story we expected.
What actually happened was… nothing.
No deploy failures.
No alert storms.
No mysterious latency graphs screaming in red.
Slack stayed quiet. The pager stayed bored. People stopped doom-scrolling dashboards during deploys like they were watching a horror movie trailer.
The idea started as a joke. Someone half-serious, half-tired said: “What if we just delete some of this stuff and see who complains?”
We had dashboards nobody checked, alerts nobody trusted, tools added after incidents that never got revisited, and enough YAML to qualify as emotional baggage. Our DevOps stack looked impressive in screenshots and terrifying in real life. New hires didn’t ask how the system worked — they asked which tool was the real one.
So we ran an experiment.
We removed about half our DevOps tooling. On purpose. Carefully, but unapologetically.
TL;DR: We deleted a huge chunk of our stack, expected chaos, and got clarity instead. This is the story of what we removed, why nothing broke, and what it taught us about modern DevOps culture especially our obsession with adding tools instead of understanding systems.
How DevOps stacks quietly get bloated
This never starts with bad intentions.
Nobody wakes up and says, “Today I will ruin our infrastructure with twelve overlapping tools and no ownership.” It usually starts after a rough incident. Something goes sideways, alerts are noisy, someone says “we didn’t have enough visibility,” and a new tool gets added like a bandage on a bruise you didn’t actually examine.
Then nobody removes it.
That’s the pattern. Tools get added during moments of stress, fear, or urgency. They show up to solve a very specific problem, often a real one. But once the incident fades, the tool sticks around. No postmortem asks, “Do we still need this?” It just becomes part of the stack, immortalized in Terraform and onboarding docs.
Multiply that by a few years and a few teams, and suddenly you’re living in a DevOps hoarder house.
You end up with two CI systems because migrating felt risky. Three observability tools because each one does one thing slightly better. Feature flags nobody remembers turning on. Dashboards that look important but have zero viewers. Alerting pipelines layered on top of alerting pipelines, like a lasagna of anxiety.
Some of this bloat is emotional. Tools make us feel safe. They give the illusion of control. If something breaks, at least we can say we had the best tooling. There’s a quiet comfort in knowing there’s a dashboard somewhere that might explain the problem, even if you don’t know which one it is.
Some of it is cultural. DevOps resumes reward tool breadth, not restraint. Adding a new system looks like progress. Deleting one feels risky, invisible, and hard to justify in a sprint review. Nobody gets praised for removing 30,000 lines of YAML and making life calmer.
And vendors are very good at exploiting this fear. Every platform promises fewer outages, better sleep, and “enterprise-grade” peace of mind. The subtext is always the same: if you don’t buy this, you’re being irresponsible.
So stacks grow. Quietly. Politely. One tool at a time.
And then one day, a new hire asks which dashboard actually matters and nobody gives the same answer.
The delete experiment what we actually removed
We didn’t start by rage-deleting tools like it was spring cleaning . That’s how you earn a permanent spot in your team’s trauma lore.
We started with rules.
First: if a tool didn’t sit on the critical path, it was guilty until proven innocent.
Second: if nobody could explain what would break if we turned it off, that was already an answer.
Third: the pager was the final judge. Not vibes. Not opinions. If the pager stayed quiet, the system was fine.
We made a list. Not a fancy spreadsheet just a shared doc with tool names and one brutal question next to each:
“What happens if this disappears?”
That’s when things got uncomfortable.
We found two CI systems doing the same job because “the migration never finished.” Multiple observability tools because each team trusted a different one. Feature flags that hadn’t been toggled since the year they were introduced. Dashboards that looked critical but had exactly zero viewers when we checked access logs.
Some tools existed purely because they once solved a problem that no longer existed. Others were added after a scary incident and never questioned again. A few were what I’d politely call emotional support SaaS they made people feel safer, even if they never actually changed decisions.
So we didn’t rip everything out at once. We turned things off slowly. Staging first. Then low-risk services. We watched deploys. We watched error rates. We watched Slack like it owed us money.
Nothing happened.
No alarms. No mysterious regressions. No angry messages asking why their favorite dashboard was gone. In a few cases, people didn’t even notice until days later and when they did, it was usually followed by, “Oh… yeah, I guess we weren’t using that anyway.”
The weirdest part wasn’t what broke.
It was how much didn’t.
Nothing broke and that’s the part that messed with us
We were waiting for consequences.
That delayed deploy.
That silent data loss.
That “hey, are alerts broken?” message that usually shows up right when you start to relax.
It didn’t come.
Deploys stayed boring. The kind you almost forget happened. Incidents didn’t disappear, but when they did happen, they were easier to reason about. Fewer tools meant fewer places to look, fewer contradictory signals, fewer tabs open like you’re defusing a bomb in a movie.
Alert volume dropped hard. Not because problems vanished, but because duplicate alerts did. The ones that survived actually meant something. When the pager went off, it wasn’t a debate anymore it was real.
The biggest change wasn’t technical. It was cognitive.
People stopped context-switching mid-incident. Nobody asked, “What does this tool say?” before acting. Ownership got clearer without us trying. Conversations shifted from dashboards to systems, from tooling quirks to failure modes.
At one point someone said, “This feels… quieter,” and nobody argued.
That’s when it clicked: most of our reliability wasn’t coming from the tools we removed. It was coming from boring fundamentals we’d been carrying the whole time simple architectures, clear ownership, and systems that failed in understandable ways.
The tools weren’t protecting us.
They were just loud.
What this says about modern DevOps culture
Somewhere along the way, DevOps stopped being about understanding systems and started being about operating tools.
We reward stacks that look impressive, not ones that are calm. Complexity gets mistaken for maturity. If your architecture diagram looks scary enough, people assume you’re doing serious work. If it looks simple, someone eventually asks what you’re missing.
A lot of tooling decisions aren’t driven by real needs. They’re driven by fear. Fear of outages. Fear of blame. Fear of being the person who said “we don’t need that” right before something breaks. Adding a tool feels defensible. Removing one feels personal.
There’s also a quiet resume economy at play. Knowing many tools looks better on paper than deeply understanding a few. We don’t interview for restraint. We interview for coverage. So stacks grow in all directions, and nobody feels empowered to say “this is enough.”
The result is burnout that doesn’t come from being on-call too much, but from thinking too much. Too many dashboards. Too many signals. Too many systems to keep in your head at once. You’re always “informed,” but rarely confident.
The uncomfortable takeaway is this: a lot of what we call DevOps maturity is actually just accumulated fear. We build layers to protect ourselves from uncertainty, and then wonder why everything feels heavy.
Deleting tools didn’t make us reckless.
It forced us to actually understand what we were running.
Conclusion subtraction is the senior move
The most surprising part of this whole experiment wasn’t that nothing broke.
It was how quickly everyone adapted once the noise was gone.
We didn’t become braver engineers. We just removed the padding. With fewer tools, problems felt closer to the system instead of buried under layers of interpretation. Decisions got faster. Ownership got clearer. On-call stopped feeling like spelunking through someone else’s maze.
There’s a quiet skill in knowing what not to add. It doesn’t show up in architecture diagrams or sprint demos. You can’t screenshot it for a postmortem. But it shows up when things go wrong and the path to understanding is short.
DevOps maturity isn’t about how many tools you can juggle. It’s about how calm your system stays when something inevitably fails. Clever stacks impress people. Calm stacks let teams sleep.
We’re not anti-tool. Some tools absolutely earned their place and proved their value when things were on fire. But the bar is higher now. If a tool can’t justify its existence during a real incident, it doesn’t get to hang around forever.
The next time your stack feels overwhelming, don’t ask what you should add.
Ask what you’re afraid to delete.
Chances are, that’s where the real work starts.
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