GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your company's workload runs on a zonal GKE cluster named "web-prod" in us-central1-a. The cluster currently has two node pools: "default-pool" (n1-standard-1) and "highmem-pool" (n2-highmem-4). All Deployments have been migrated to schedule only on "highmem-pool". You must permanently remove "default-pool" to lower costs while ensuring running Pods are evicted gracefully and without creating orphaned managed instance groups. Which gcloud command should you run?

Run gcloud container clusters update web-prod --remove-node-pools=default-pool --zone=us-central1-a.
Scale the pool to zero with gcloud container clusters resize web-prod --node-pool=default-pool --size=0 --zone=us-central1-a and leave it in place.
Delete the underlying managed instance group with gcloud compute instance-groups managed delete gke-web-prod-default-pool-* --zone=us-central1-a.
Run gcloud container node-pools delete default-pool --cluster=web-prod --zone=us-central1-a and confirm the prompt.

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Answer Description

The supported way to remove a node pool from a GKE cluster is to use the dedicated gcloud container node-pools delete command and identify the pool, the parent cluster, and its location. When this command runs, GKE cordons and drains all nodes in the pool, reschedules any Pods onto remaining schedulable nodes ("highmem-pool" in this case), and then deletes the underlying managed instance group, so no orphaned resources remain. Deleting the Compute Engine managed instance group directly would cause GKE to recreate the pool, scaling the pool to zero leaves the pool (and its metadata) in place, and there is no --remove-node-pools flag on gcloud container clusters update. Therefore, using:

gcloud container node-pools delete default-pool --cluster=web-prod --zone=us-central1-a

is the correct and supported approach.

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