What is IT Minimalism in Software Development?

IT Minimalism is inspired by the design trend in interior design: stop adding tools, frameworks, and dependencies once you already have everything you need. This prevents a cluttered, noisy feeling when you are inside a room. It also gives a certain relevance to the parts that are there and gives focus.

This philosophy can also be applied in IT. The less complex the solution for your problem, the less noise will be surrounding the actual logic for your application. This helps in maintaining the solution after the initial implementation.

Why IT Minimalism?

In IT Minimalism, “noise” means unnecessary software complexity—extra frameworks, redundant services, and heavy dependencies—which teams must understand, maintain, and secure over time. Noise is also the constant possibility of your solution to become vulnerable.

For example, when using the Node.js ecosystem, your application often includes hundreds of dependencies and sub-dependencies. Over time, many of these become vulnerable, increasing the attack surface and adding maintenance overhead. IT Minimalism helps reduce this risk by choosing ecosystems and frameworks wisely.

Where to start?

When you are looking for a solution to a certain problem. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the update interval and long-term maintenance history of the chosen product or framework?
2. How hard is it to update the chosen product/framework (based on history)?
3. What is the attack surface of the chose product/framework?

Real life Example

As a technical example applying IT minimalism, I’ve written another blog: https://www.infosupport.com/building-a-secure-http-upload-endpoint-with-nginx-and-docker

That blog describes the case that a file should be received via HTTPS each week. The team that hosts the HTTPS service primarily focusses on secure information exchange with all kinds of existing 3rd party systems.

To answer the questions above for this example:

1. Update interval -> Security fixes are automatically incorporated in the docker container as part of the Ubuntu package updates.
2. Update changes -> Usually there are no configuration changes needed when security fixes are applied.
3. Attack surface -> By using Nginx in a minimal Docker container, the attack surface stays small because you explicitly control the allowed paths and methods. This is a prime example of applying IT Minimalism in cloud-native architecture: fewer moving parts, fewer vulnerabilities.