Deleting a Namespace and All Its Objects

The cascaded deletion#

Another handy feature of the Namespaces is their cascading effect. If, for example, we delete the testing Namespace, all the objects and the resources running inside it will be removed as well.

We deleted the testing Namespace and retrieved all the objects residing in it. If the resources were not deleted very quickly, the output is as follows.

Please note that, in your case, the output might show more objects. If that’s the case, you were too fast, and Kubernetes did not yet have time to remove them.

After a second or two, the only objects in the testing Namespace are the Pods with the status terminating. Once the grace period is over, they will be removed as well. The Namespace is gone, and everything we created in it was removed as well.

When it Comes in Handy?#

The ability to remove a Namespace and all the objects and the resources it hosts is especially useful when we want to create temporary objects. A good example would be continuous deployment (CDP) processes. We can create a Namespace to build, package, test, and do all the other tasks our pipeline requires. Once we’re finished, we can simply remove the Namespace. Otherwise, we would need to keep track of all the objects we created and make sure that they are removed before we terminate the CDP pipeline.

Verification#

Now that the Namespace hosting our release 2.0 is gone, we might want to double check that the production release (1.0) is still running.

The output should show the go-demo-2 Deployments, ReplicaSets, Pods, and Services since we are still using the default context.

To be on the safe side, we’ll check that a request coming from the go-demo-2.com domain still returns a response from the release 1.0.

As expected, the response is hello, release 1.0!.

Command for CDP#

If this were a continuous deployment pipeline, the only thing left would be to execute rolling updates that would change the image of the production release to vfarcic/go-demo-2:2.0. The command could be as follows.

That was all about the deletion process of Namespaces.

Destroying everything#

The chapter is finished, and that means that we are about to remove the cluster.

Try it yourself#

A list of all the commands used in the lesson is given below.