Deleting a cluster

Autopilot Standard

This page explains how to delete a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster.

When you delete a cluster, GKE deletes the following resources:

The control plane resources
All of the node instances in the cluster
Any Pods that are running on those instances
Any firewalls and routes created by GKE at the time of cluster creation
Data stored in host hostPath and emptyDir volumes
If registered to a fleet, the cluster's fleet membership, unless the cluster was registered using a legacy command.

Review how GKE handles the following resources during cluster deletion:

GKE attempts to delete all load balancer resources. However, for Services (type: LoadBalancer), we recommend that you delete the Services before deleting your cluster. For clusters with hundreds of Services or more, GKE might not delete all load balancer resources upon cluster deletion.
GKE retains persistent disk volumes during cluster deletion. See how to manage persistent storage during cluster deletion.

Before you begin

Before you start, make sure that you have performed the following tasks:

If you want to use the Google Cloud CLI for this task, install and then initialize the gcloud CLI. If you previously installed the gcloud CLI, get the latest version by running gcloud components update.
Note: For existing gcloud CLI installations, make sure to set the compute/region property. If you use primarily zonal clusters, set the compute/zone instead. By setting a default location, you can avoid errors in the gcloud CLI like the following: One of [--zone, --region] must be supplied: Please specify location. You might need to specify the location in certain commands if the location of your cluster differs from the default that you set.

To delete a cluster using the Google Cloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters delete CLUSTER_NAME

Replace CLUSTER_NAME with the name of the cluster that you want to delete.

For more information, refer to the gcloud container clusters delete documentation.

To delete a cluster using the Google Cloud console, perform the following steps:

Go to the Google Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to Google Kubernetes Engine
Next to the cluster you want to delete, click Actions, then click Delete.
When prompted to confirm, click Delete again.

To delete multiple clusters at once, select them and click Delete. When prompted to confirm, click Delete again.