How To Completely Uninstall Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is often referred to as K-8 It is an open-source container known as a perspiration platform that is designed to concentrate the deployment with scaling and other types of management tasks of containerized apps.

While Kubernetes itself offers a very large number of features and advantages for the management of complex infrastructure applications, there may sometimes be a need for you to uninstall or switch to a different tool. For this, you will have to uninstall Kubernetes and then complete the required tasks, such as installing some different orchestration tools or Kubernetes if you want, so in this article, we will understand how we can uninstall Kubernetes.

Uninstalling Kubernetes Components

There are various steps involved in the uninstallation of the components of Kubernetes, so let's go one by one and understand how we can uninstall the Kubernetes components.

Step 1: Uninstall Kubeadm, Kubectl, and Kubelet

The first step is to uninstall all three packages that come with Kubernetes; these are the components that are primarily responsible for Kubernetes. To uninstall this, we run the following command:

sudo apt-get purge kubeadm kubectl kubelet kubernetes-cni kube*

This will give us the following output as a result:

Step 2: Remove Configuration & Data:

After uninstalling the components of the kubernetes we need to make sure that we remove the configuration as well as all the data present in the system, for this we will run the following command:

sudo rm -rf ~/.kube
sudo rm -rf /etc/cni
sudo rm -rf /etc/kubernetes
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/etcd
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/kubelet

Note: These commands are used for default directories, if you have installed the kubernetes components somewhere else then change the command accordingly.

Running these commands will result in deletion of all the configuration and data.

Step 3: Resetting the iptables:

Once the above step is complete and all the configuration file as well as the data is deleted, we will need to reset the iptables.

In order to reset the iptables we will have to run the following command in the terminal:

sudo iptables -F && sudo iptables -t nat -F && sudo iptables -t mangle -F && sudo iptables -X

Once we run the above command we should not see anything or any error as output, if there is no error and the command is executed then we can say that the iptables are reset successfully, as you can see below:

Removing Add-ons and Extensions

If there is any add on or extensions present in the kubernetes then you will have to remove the extension as well as the data for the extensions as well before you move forward. you can easily delete any extensions and add ons by mentioning the package name and purge command.

Note: There was no extension present hence deleting an add-on is not possible.

Cluster Configurations and Manifests

Now we will also need to delete any cluster configuration as well as manifests present, this is an easy step as well, we will simply have to use the following command in order to delete the cluster configurations and manifests:

Use the above command and along with it provide an individual value in the kubeconfig file for unsetting it.

Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)

Custom resources are another part of the kubernetes that we will have to get rid of, for deleting the custom resource definitions we will have to use the following command:

kubectl delete all --all-namespaces --all

You can replace the --all with the names of custom resources that you want to delete, in this case we want to delete all the custom resource as we are uninstalling the kubernetes we have given the --all command that will delete all the custom resource definitions.

Output:

Post-Uninstallation Verification

This is the final step, in this step we will test whether the kubernetes have been uninstalled or not, for this we will run the following command:

If you also see an error similar to this then the kubernetes is uninstalled in your system as well.