Remove a Cluster from Tanzu Service Mesh

Products

• VMware Tanzu Service Mesh

Issue/Introduction

This is an informational article on the steps that needs to be done after removing a cluster from the Tanzu Service Mesh

Cause

We can follow the steps mentioned in the official docs  https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tanzu-Service-Mesh/services/getting-started-guide/GUID-BED54606-C064-4B77-B66E-91E0C2CB72F2.html to remove the cluster from TSM

However this doesn't remove the proxy container that was part of the service mesh

Resolution

Sidecar containers (istio-proxy) will keep running along with the application pods until we do a rollout restart.

Removing the cluster from TSM removes the istio control plane components like istiod and all other pods running in the istio-system namespace and deleting the registration yaml deletes the vmware-system-tsm namespace along with all the components and CRD created on the cluster however data plane (sidecar proxies) will still be running and traffic would be flowing through it.

Also, the namespace would still have the label "istio-injection=enabled" but that won't impact the newly created pods as istiod component is no longer present.

Perform a rollout restart on the application which was part of the service mesh would cleanup these proxy containers.