Disable GKE Enterprise

If you no longer want to pay for GKE Enterprise at all, you can choose to disable GKE Enterprise in your project and immediately stop your GKE Enterprise billing. Disabling GKE Enterprise removes your entitlement to use GKE Enterprise-only features in that project and downgrades all enterprise-tier clusters on Google Cloud to the standard tier. You can then decide to keep the clusters but uninstall the features, or clean up your clusters entirely to avoid incurring any further Google Cloud charges.

For clusters on Google Cloud only, you can downgrade individual clusters to the standard tier. This removes your entitlement to use GKE Enterprise-only features on those clusters, and means that the clusters no longer incur GKE Enterprise charges.

This page is for IT administrators and Operators who manage the lifecycle of the underlying tech infrastructure. To learn more about common roles and example tasks that we reference in Google Cloud content, see Common GKE Enterprise user roles and tasks.

For more information about how to pay for GKE Enterprise, see our pricing guide.

Disable the Anthos API

Disabling the Anthos API for a project immediately stops your GKE Enterprise pay-as-you-go billing for the relevant project. After you have disabled the API, you are no longer entitled to use most enterprise features in this project until you reenable GKE Enterprise. Enterprise-tier clusters on Google Cloud become standard-tier clusters. Enterprise features remain installed on the clusters but are not supported. Any underlying workloads are not affected.

To disable the API for a project:

Console

  1. Go to the Anthos API overview page in the Google Cloud console, ensuring the appropriate project is selected.

Go to the Anthos API page

  1. Click Disable API.

gcloud

Run the following command:

gcloud services disable anthos.googleapis.com

Disable GKE Enterprise for individual clusters

For clusters on Google Cloud only, you can downgrade individual clusters to the standard tier.

To change a cluster to the standard tier:

Console

  1. Go to the GKE Clusters page. This page shows all your clusters.

Go to the GKE Clusters page

  1. Click Actions next to the cluster in the list that you want to update.
  2. In the Actions menu, select Change tier.
  3. In the dialog that displays, select Standard tier and click Save changes to confirm the action.

gcloud

Run the following command to disable GKE Enterprise for the cluster:

gcloud container clusters update CLUSTER NAME --tier standard

Replace CLUSTER NAME with the name of your cluster.

Cluster cleanup options

After you have disabled the API or downgraded your cluster, there are two cleanup options for managing your clusters.

Delete clusters

This cleanup option avoids incurring further Google Cloud charges for the clusters. To delete a GKE cluster, follow the instructions for your deployment option:

Uninstall GKE Enterprise features

If you want to keep your clusters (for example, if you upgraded an existing GKE cluster with production workloads), you can manually uninstall or disable GKE Enterprise features.

The following guides show you how to uninstall enterprise features:

After you have uninstalled the features, you can also choose to unregister the cluster from your fleet following the instructions in Unregistering a cluster. Only GKE on Google Cloud and attached third-party clusters can be unregistered.

Reenable GKE Enterprise

If you accidentally disable GKE Enterprise, your clusters and their workloads are still there, with GKE Enterprise features installed. This means that you can easily reenable GKE Enterprise without going through a full setup.