Uninstall

Removing the operator is a Helm uninstall plus an explicit CRD cleanup. Uninstalling does not change any autoscaling configuration already applied to your workloads - your HPAs and ScaledObjects keep whatever values were last set.

10.1 Remove the operator

helm uninstall <release> --namespace <namespace>

This removes the Deployment, ServiceAccount, ClusterRole/ClusterRoleBinding, the leader-election Lease, and any chart-created Secrets (LLM key, license).

10.2 Remove the CRD and recommendations

Helm does not delete CRDs it installed (a deliberate safety default), so the ScalingRecommendation CRD and any remaining recommendation resources stay until you remove them explicitly.

Inspect what remains first:

kubectl get scalingrecommendations -A

Then delete the CRD. This deletes every ScalingRecommendation in the cluster (the recommendation history, not your live autoscalers):

kubectl delete crd scalingrecommendations.stepscale.io

If you only want to clear recommendations but keep the CRD (for example, before a reinstall), delete the resources instead:

kubectl delete scalingrecommendations --all -A

10.3 What is left behind

Item	Removed by helm uninstall?	Notes
Operator Deployment / pods	Yes	-
ServiceAccount, ClusterRole, ClusterRoleBinding	Yes	-
Leader-election Lease	Yes	-
Chart-created Secrets (LLM key, license)	Yes	A Secret you created yourself and referenced via existingSecret is not removed - delete it manually if desired.
ScalingRecommendation CRD + resources	No	Remove explicitly (10.2).
Applied HPA / ScaledObject changes	No	Your autoscalers keep their last-applied values. Revert manually if you want the pre-stepscale configuration back.

10.4 Reverting applied configuration

If you want a workload back to its configuration from before a stepscale change, the previous values are recorded in the recommendation’s configDiff (the from side) before you delete the CRs:

kubectl get scalerec <name> -n <namespace> -o jsonpath='{.spec.configDiff}{"\n"}'

Apply those from values to the HPA/ScaledObject manually (or via your GitOps source of truth) before uninstalling, so you retain the record.