If you're scaling your cluster up or down, it's essential to know how the manual process of node deregistration and draining works. We'll use the kubectl drain command here to remove all pods from your node before removing the node from your cluster. Removing all pods from your nodes ensures that there are not running workloads on your instance or VM when you remove it.

Let's get a list of available nodes using the following command:

kubectl get nodes

Once we have the node list, the command to drain nodes is fairly simple:

kubectl drain <node>

This command will take some time to execute, as it has to reschedule the workloads on the node onto other machines that have available resources. Once the draining is complete, you can remove the node via your preferred programmatic API. If you're merely removing the node for maintenance, you can add it back to the available nodes with the uncordon command:

kubectl uncordon <node>