Uninstall Anthos Service Mesh

This page explains how to uninstall Anthos Service Mesh.

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

Uninstall Anthos Service Mesh

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

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

1. To prevent interruption of application traffic:

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

2. Disable sidecar auto-injection on your namespace(s), if it is enabled:

    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.

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

4. Remove any ControlPlaneRevision resources in the cluster:

   kubectl delete controlplanerevision -n istio-system
   

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

   In-cluster Anthos Service Mesh

   Delete the validatingwebhooksconfiguration and mutatingwebhookconfiguration.

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

   Managed Anthos Service Mesh

   A. Delete the validatingwebhooksconfiguration.

   kubectl delete validatingwebhookconfiguration istiod-istio-system-mcp
   

   B. Delete the 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 RELEASE_CHANNEL
   

6. Once all workloads come up and no proxies are observed, then you can safely delete the in-cluster control plane to stop billing. If you deployed a managed control plane, then it is automatically deleted with the previous step.

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

   istioctl x uninstall --purge
   

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

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

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

8. 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