Uninstall Cloud Service Mesh

Note: This guide only supports Cloud Service Mesh with Istio APIs and does not support Google Cloud APIs. For more information see, Cloud Service Mesh overview.

This page explains how to uninstall Cloud Service Mesh if you are using the Istio APIs. If you are using Compute Engine APIs, no steps are necessary. See the Cloud Service Mesh overview to understand the differences.

Warning: Following these instructions to uninstall Cloud Service Mesh removes all configurations regardless of control plane type (in-cluster or managed).

Uninstall Cloud Service Mesh

Use the following commands to uninstall all Cloud Service Mesh components. These commands also delete the istio-system namespace and all custom resource definitions (CRDs), including any CRDs that you applied.

Warning: If you created CRDs, make sure you have copies of them before proceeding through the following steps.

1. To prevent interruption of application traffic:

   • Downgrade any STRICT mTLS policies to PERMISSIVE.
   • Remove any AuthorizationPolicy that may block traffic.

2. Disable Automatic Management on this cluster (whether you applied it directly or using the fleet-default configuration):

     gcloud container fleet mesh update \
        --management manual \
        --memberships MEMBERSHIP_NAME \
        --project FLEET_PROJECT_ID \
        --location MEMBERSHIP_LOCATION
   

   Replace the following:

   • MEMBERSHIP_NAME is the membership name listed when you verified that your cluster was registered to the fleet.
   • MEMBERSHIP_LOCATION is the location of your membership (either a region, or global).

3. Disable sidecar auto-injection on your namespace(s), if it is enabled. Run the following command to display namespace labels:

    kubectl get namespace YOUR_NAMESPACE --show-labels
   

   The output is similar to the following:

    NAME   STATUS   AGE     LABELS
    demo   Active   4d17h   istio.io/rev=asm-181-5

   If you see istio.io/rev= in the output under the LABELS column, remove it:

    kubectl label namespace YOUR_NAMESPACE istio.io/rev-
   

   If you see istio-injection in the output under the LABELS column, remove it:

    kubectl label namespace YOUR_NAMESPACE istio-injection-
   

   If you don't see either the istio.io/rev or istio-injection labels, then auto-injection wasn't enabled on the namespace.

4. Restart your workloads that have sidecars injected to remove the proxies.

5. If you're using managed Cloud Service Mesh, check which control plane implementation you have in your cluster, this will help delete relevant resources in further steps.

6. If you're using managed Cloud Service Mesh, remove all controlplanerevision resources in the cluster:

   kubectl delete controlplanerevision asm-managed asm-managed-rapid asm-managed-stable -n istio-system --ignore-not-found=true
   

7. Delete webhooks from your cluster, if they exist.

   In-cluster Cloud Service Mesh

   Delete the validatingwebhooksconfiguration and mutatingwebhookconfiguration.

   kubectl delete validatingwebhookconfiguration,mutatingwebhookconfiguration -l operator.istio.io/component=Pilot
   

   Managed Cloud Service Mesh

   A. Delete the validatingwebhooksconfiguration.

   kubectl delete validatingwebhookconfiguration istiod-istio-system-mcp
   

   B. Delete all mutatingwebhookconfiguration.

   Note: Use the RELEASE_CHANNEL according to the release channel you provisioned. For example, Regular(istiod-asm-managed), Rapid (istiod-asm-managed-rapid), and Stable (istiod-asm-managed-stable).

   kubectl delete mutatingwebhookconfiguration istiod-RELEASE_CHANNEL
   

8. Once all workloads come up and no proxies are observed, then you can safely delete the in-cluster control plane to stop billing.

   To remove the in-cluster control plane, run the following command:

   istioctl uninstall --purge
   

   If there are no other control planes, you can delete the istio-system namespace to get rid of all Cloud Service Mesh resources. Otherwise, delete the services corresponding to the Cloud Service Mesh revisions. This avoids deleting shared resources, such as CRDs.

9. Delete the istio-system and asm-system namespaces:

    kubectl delete namespace istio-system asm-system --ignore-not-found=true
   

10. Check if the deletions were successful:

     kubectl get ns
    

    The output should indicate a Terminating state and return as shown, otherwise you might have to manually delete any remaining resources in the namespaces and try again.

     NAME                 STATUS       AGE
     istio-system         Terminating  71m
     asm-system           Terminating  71m
    

11. If you will delete your clusters, or have already deleted them, ensure that each cluster is unregistered from your fleet.

12. If you enabled managed Cloud Service Mesh fleet-default configuration and want to disable it for future clusters, disable it. You can skip this step if you're only uninstalling from a single cluster.

     gcloud container hub mesh disable --fleet-default-member-config --project FLEET_PROJECT_ID
    

    Where FLEET_PROJECT_ID is the ID of your Fleet Host project.

13. If you enabled managed Cloud Service Mesh, check and delete managed resources if they present:

    Note: If your cluster is an Autopilot cluster, you cannot delete resources from the kube-system namespace. If you're uninstalling managed Cloud Service Mesh and you're keeping your cluster, contact Support to ensure that these resources are deleted.

    1. Delete the mdp-controller deployment:

         kubectl delete deployment mdp-controller -n kube-system
       

    2. If you have the TRAFFIC_DIRECTOR control plane implementation, clean up Transparent Health Check resources. Normally these are removed automatically, but you can make sure they are cleaned up by doing the following:

       1. Delete the snk daemonset.

             kubectl delete daemonset snk -n kube-system
          

       2. Delete the firewall rule.

             gcloud compute firewall-rules delete gke-csm-thc-FIRST_8_CHARS_OF_CLUSTER_ID
          

          Replace the following:

          • FIRST_8_CHARS_OF_CLUSTER_ID is the first 8 characters of the Cluster ID for your specific cluster.

    3. Check to see if the istio-cni-plugin-config configmap is present:

         kubectl get configmap istio-cni-plugin-config -n kube-system
       

       If present, delete the istio-cni-plugin-config configmap:

         kubectl delete configmap istio-cni-plugin-config -n kube-system
       

       Warning: The network reliability of your GKE cluster may be impacted if you don't delete this configmap.

    4. Delete the istio-cni-node daemonset:

         kubectl delete daemonset istio-cni-node -n kube-system
       

14. If you're uninstalling managed Cloud Service Mesh, contact Support to ensure that all Google Cloud resources are cleaned up. The istio-system namespace and config maps may also continue to be recreated if you don't follow this step.

Upon completion of these steps, all Cloud Service Mesh components, including proxies, in-cluster certificate authorities, and RBAC roles and bindings, are systematically removed from the cluster. During the installation process, a Google-owned service account is granted the necessary permissions to establish the service mesh resources within the cluster. These uninstall instructions don't revoke these permissions, allowing for a seamless re-activation of Cloud Service Mesh in the future.

Note: Some resources (e.g. Network Endpoint Groups or NEGs) will be orphaned after the systematic removal of these components. To err on the side of caution, Cloud Service Mesh must fail open during clean up. This is to ensure that the uninstallation of managed Cloud Service Mesh never has a negative impact other networking resources in your project or on the workloads. To have these orphaned resources removed for the purposes of hygiene or "house cleaning", contact GCP Support