I Deleted 40% of Our Kubernetes Config. Here's What Stayed.

Our Kubernetes manifests were 2,000 lines of copy-pasted YAML. After cleanup: 1,200 lines. Better reliability.

What I Removed

Duplicate HPA configurations that contradicted each other. Init containers that did nothing. Resource limits set by guessing. Multiple replicas for stateless services that's pointless.

What Stayed

The actual health checks (liveness and readiness probes that matched real behavior). Proper pod disruption budgets. The services that actually needed ClusterIP vs the ones we changed to LoadBalancer out of habit.

The Process

1. Delete one thing
2. Deploy to staging
3. Watch for 24 hours
4. If nothing breaks, merge

Sounds tedious. It is. But we caught three real issues during the process.

The Surprising Finding

Most of our "production-grade" config was cargo-culted from tutorials. Real production needs are usually simpler than tutorials suggest.

What I'd Tell My Past Self

Start with minimal configs. Add complexity only when you have a specific reason, not anticipated future needs.

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What's your Kubernetes config-to-code ratio?