Uninstalling Istio on GKE

This guide shows you how to uninstall the Istio on GKE add-on from a cluster.

Removing Istio from a cluster

The simplest way to remove the Istio on GKE add-on is to delete the cluster. However, if the cluster has an existing application that must be preserved, disabling Istio requires the following steps:

  1. Ensure your default mTLS mode is set to Permissive mTLS.
  2. Shift traffic away from the Istio ingress gateway.
  3. Turn off sidecar auto-injection, if enabled. 
    kubectl label namespace your-namespace istio-injection=disabled
  4. Restart application pods (for example using rolling restart) to remove the Envoy sidecars.
  5. Remove the Istio control plane with gcloud: 
    gcloud beta container clusters update my-cluster --project=$PROJECT_ID \
  --update-addons=Istio=DISABLED