Removed: the operator itself — 1,854 lines of controller code, six controllers, one pod, and the standing service account that came with all of it, whose role could get, list, watch, create, update, patch and delete secrets, pods, deployments and more, around the clock, whether or not anybody was using the system.
Outcome: 616 fewer lines, one fewer image to patch, and an audit log that names the engineer who acted instead of a service account nobody can trace back to a person. The only service account left can “raise its hand and update its own status line. It cannot read a secret, make a pod, or touch another session.”
tiny gave the cleanest example in 2026. The RBAC diff is the argument: “A standing service account that can read every secret in the namespace and grant itself friends,” as the writeup puts it, followed by the line that should sting — “Every operator you install carries some version of this, and we all stopped seeing it.”
Source: tiny, We Deleted Our Operator (28 August 2026)