Clean Up Your Google Kubernetes Pods

A simple solution to a common problem

If you have ever used google GKE (Kubernetes Engine) with preemptible nodes you would likely have found yourself in the situation of having a bunch of pods sitting around in a Shutdown state littering your cluster. GKE likely preempted the node the pods were running on, shutdown the pods, and then started up new pods on new nodes. The old pods are are left behind just so that you can check the logs in case anything went wrong outside of the nodes being shutdown.

We often don't need these pods at all and should be cleaning them up by deleting them. This is a simple bash command to eliminate all of those pods.

$> kubectl get pods | grep Shutdown | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kubectl delete pod