Deletions That Don’t Scale

I recently discovered that Cloudflare Pages, the service I was using to host this site, seems to be on the path to deprecation. They want to combine everything into the Workers platform, which I have experience with, and so is fine by me.

After migrating my site successfully, I was ready for the final step of deleting my pages project… only to get an error. Something along the lines of “you have too many deployments, go read this thing.” Huh?

You may not be able to delete your Pages project if it has a high number (over 100) of deployments. The Cloudflare team is tracking this issue.

Turns out you gotta download a random Node script the Cloudflare team wrote, inject it with some API credentials, and do a slow deletion yourself.

One one hand, this is kinda annoying. Can’t a big company at Cloudflare find a team to implement the slow background deletion job?

On the other hand, why optimize for a relatively uncommon case that is likely associated with churn anyways? The old wisdom of do the things that don’t scale applies. I can’t be too mad; even with all of the sleeps in the script, it still only took a few extra minutes of my time, and I’ll likely never need delete a Pages project again.