Uninstall istio (all components) completely from kubernetes cluster

Question

I installed istio using these commands:

VERSION = 1.0.5
GCP = gcloud
K8S = kubectl

@$(K8S) apply -f istio-$(VERSION)/install/kubernetes/helm/istio/templates/crds.yaml
@$(K8S) apply -f istio-$(VERSION)/install/kubernetes/istio-demo-auth.yaml
@$(K8S) get pods -n istio-system
@$(K8S) label namespace default istio-injection=enabled
@$(K8S) get svc istio-ingressgateway -n istio-system

Now, how do I completely uninstall it including all containers/ingress/egress etc (everthing installed by istio-demo-auth.yaml?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you used istioctl, it's pretty easy:

istioctl x uninstall --purge

Of course, it would be easier if that command were listed in istioctl --help...

Reference: https://istio.io/latest/docs/setup/install/istioctl/#uninstall-istio

Answer 2

Based on their documentation here, you can generate all specs as yml file then pipe it to simple kubectl's delete operation

istioctl manifest generate <your original installation options> | kubectl delete -f -

here's an example:

istioctl manifest generate --set profile=default | kubectl delete -f -

A drawback of this approach though is to remember all options you have used when you installed istio which might be quite hard to remember especially if you enabled specific components.

If you have installed istio using helm's chart, you can uninstall it easily

First, list all installed charts:

helm list -n istio-system
NAME    NAMESPACE   REVISION    UPDATED                                 STATUS   
istiod  istio-system    1       2020-03-07 15:01:56.141094 -0500 EST    deployed   

and then delete/uninstall the chart using the following syntax:

helm delete -n istio-system --purge istio-system
helm delete -n istio-system --purge istio-init
...

Check their website for more information on how to do this.

If you already installed istio using istioctl or helm in its own separate namespace, you can easily delete completely that namespace which will in turn delete all resources created inside it.

kubectl delete namespace istio-system