Stack Overflow
Served 209 million requests a day from nine web servers
A top-ten website ran on a hardware list short enough to read out loud, because it never split into services it did not need.
All case studies
Simplification
10 case studies tagged simplification.
Twilio Segment
Replaced 140 services with one
Every destination had its own queue and repository until on-call was "literally losing sleep" and the test suite took an hour to run.
authentik
Removed Redis as a required dependency
The self-hosted identity provider moved sessions, caching, locks and WebSockets onto PostgreSQL, leaving customers one stateful service fewer to patch.
Basecamp
Says no to most feature requests
A small team runs a product used by millions by refusing features rather than scheduling them, and by keeping what it operates small enough to hold.
Codat
Took roughly 400 deployable units down to 160
A single Azure certificate change had to be fixed in hundreds of services, so the team merged services and re-architected nothing.
US Navy
Terminated 11 legacy systems and saved over USD 100 million
The Department of the Navy retired at least 11 obsolete financial systems and saved over $100 million, while GAO found the consolidation plans kept slipping.
Prime Video
Collapsed a distributed pipeline into one process
Step Functions, a Lambda per detector and an S3 bucket between stages hit a scaling wall at 5% of expected load, so the team moved it all into one process.
Blue
Left Render and Aurora for two dedicated servers
A three-person team replaced a managed frontend platform and a managed database with dedicated servers, a five-line deploy file and an Ansible playbook.
City of Austin
Counted 1,005 applications and retired more than 230
A rationalisation run across 47 city departments produced confirmed savings of $8.1 million a year and two intake gates for anything new.
Shopify
Moved inventory reservations out of Redis into MySQL
Reservations and the inventory ledger lived in two systems, so the team put them in one database and dropped a cluster to maintain.