Cordoning nodes in GKE Autopilot

Occasionally you may wish to remove and replace a node in GKE Autopilot.

That can be done with

kubectl cordon $NODE_NAME

If you want to immediate drain the Pods and put them in the pending state, you can further drain the node:

kubectl drain $NODE_NAME --delete-emptydir-data --ignore-daemonsets

What about if you need to do all nodes? Be aware that this is pretty disruptive, and lot more aggressive than if you leave Autopilot to handle the upgrade itself (which is recommended), but you can apply this technique to the cluster as a whole like so:

for node in $(kubectl get nodes -o jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.name}'); do
  kubectl cordon $node
done