Unregistering a cluster

This page describes how to manually unregister a cluster from a Google Cloud fleet. When you manually unregister a cluster, its connection to the fleet is removed but the cluster remains.

You can unregister GKE clusters on Google Cloud and attached third-party clusters.

Note that moving registered clusters between fleets (unregistering then reregistering) is not currently recommended, as it can result in unexpected or unwanted behavior: for example, your workloads' fleet Workload Identity will change, potentially resulting in blocked requests and outages. The recommended approach is to create a new cluster in the fleet in which you want your workloads to reside, then move your workloads from your old cluster to the new cluster.

Unregister a cluster

gcloud

Unregister a GKE cluster

This command can currently only be used to unregister GKE clusters registered using gcloud container clusters update or gcloud container clusters create.

Run the following command:

gcloud beta container clusters update CLUSTER_NAME --clear-fleet-project

where:

CLUSTER_NAME is the cluster's name.

Deleting a registered cluster with gcloud container clusters delete also deletes the cluster's fleet membership.

Unregister a GKE cluster (legacy command)

Run either of the following commands:

gcloud container fleet memberships unregister [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] \
   --project=[PROJECT_ID] \
   --gke-uri=[GKE_URI]

gcloud container fleet memberships unregister [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] \
   --project=[PROJECT_ID] \
   --gke-cluster=[GKE_CLUSTER]

where:

[PROJECT_ID] is your Google Cloud project ID. Learn how to find this value.
[MEMBERSHIP_NAME] is the membership name that corresponds to your cluster. To list all the memberships on the Hub, run: gcloud container fleet memberships list.
[GKE_URI] is the URI of the GKE cluster, for example: 'https://container.googleapis.com/projects/my-project/locations/us-central1-a/clusters/my-cluster'. You can obtain the URI by running gcloud container clusters list --uri. The provided URI will be validated to confirm that it maps to the valid GKE cluster.
[GKE_CLUSTER] is the location/name of the GKE cluster. The location can be a zone or a region for example: us-central1-a/my-cluster.

Unregister an EKS or AKS attached cluster

These instructions apply to Amazon EKS and Azure AKS clusters registered using the latest version of our attached clusters feature. Clusters attached using the previous generation of this feature should follow the instructions in the next section.

Unregister any other attached cluster type

Run the following command:

gcloud container fleet memberships unregister [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] \
   --project=[PROJECT_ID] \
   --context=[KUBECONFIG_CONTEXT] \
   --kubeconfig=[KUBECONFIG_PATH]

where:

[PROJECT_ID] is your Google Cloud project ID. Learn how to find this value.
[MEMBERSHIP_NAME] is the membership name that corresponds to your cluster. To get list of all the memberships on the Hub, run: gcloud container fleet memberships list.
[KUBECONFIG_PATH] is the local filepath where your kubeconfig containing an entry for the cluster file is stored. This defaults to $KUBECONFIG if that environment variable is set, otherwise this defaults to $HOME/.kube/config.
[KUBECONFIG_CONTEXT] is the cluster's context as it appears in the kubeconfig file. You can get this value from the command line by running kubectl config current-context.

Console

Unregister a GKE cluster

To unregister a GKE cluster:

Go to the Anthos Clusters page. This page shows all your registered clusters.

Go to the Anthos Clusters page
Select the cluster you want to unregister from the list. A details panel displays.
In the details panel, click Unregister.
In the dialog that displays, click Unregister again to confirm the action.

Unregister any other cluster type

To unregister any other fleet cluster:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the GKE clusters page.

Go to GKE clusters
In the list of clusters, click Actions next to the registered cluster, and then click Deregister.
In the dialog that displays, click Deregister again to confirm the action.

Verify that the Connect Agent namespace is deleted (Optional)

After you unregister a cluster, you can verify that the namespace used by the Connect Agent has been deleted. This applies to registrations that install the Connect Agent only. To do so, run:

kubectl get ns -l hub.gke.io/project

If this command returns no output, the namespace has already been deleted.

Delete the Google Cloud Service Account

If you created a service account for the Connect Agent, you can delete it as follows:

gcloud iam service-accounts delete [SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME]

Unregister an unavailable cluster

If you want to unregister a cluster that you can no longer access, perform the following steps:

List the clusters (a.k.a memberships) that are currently registered:
```
gcloud container fleet memberships list
```
In the command output, the Name column lists the membership names of registered clusters, and the EXTERNAL_ID column lists the clusters' UIDs of the kube-system namespace.
To unregister an unavailable cluster, run the following command:
```
gcloud container fleet memberships delete [MEMBERSHIP_NAME]
```
where [MEMBERSHIP_NAME] is the membership name that corresponds to your cluster.