Remove a node

What this gets you

A worker taken back out of your cluster with nothing left behind — no lingering workloads, network peer or certificate — so the machine is free to repurpose or the cluster free to shrink.

Before you start

• The node you’re removing is a worker. The master cannot be removed this way.
• Anything important running on that worker should be able to tolerate being moved — removal drains its workloads elsewhere in the cluster before the node leaves.

The steps

1. Open Nodes, find the worker’s entry, and choose Remove.

   

   

   The Nodes list with a worker's entry open, showing the Remove action

2. Confirm the removal.

Removal cannot be undone from this screen. The worker’s workloads are drained first, so nothing running on them is lost — but the node itself is gone from the cluster and has to be added again from scratch, from Add your first node, if you want it back.

Buddy then runs the removal with live progress: it drains the node’s workloads, has it leave the cluster, tears down its private network connection and frees the address it held, and removes its entry from the cluster.

How you know it worked

The worker’s entry disappears from Nodes, and the cluster’s node count returns to what it was before you added it.

What can go wrong

• Removal seems stuck

See this symptom in Troubleshooting.