With an existing Kubernetes Cluster (e.g. v 1.2.2 on GCE) that has set ENABLE_NODE_LOGGING=true and LOGGING_DESTINATION=gcp, what is the recommended way to stop those pods from running on each node and deploy a replacement DaemonSet that uses a custom fluentd configuration and docker image?
This should take into consider future Kubernetes upgrades as well.
If you set those configuration parameters when starting your cluster, it will create a manifest file on each node that configures fluentd to send container logs to google cloud logging. You can remove those manifest files and the kubelet will stop the fluentd containers (and you should also modify your instance template to change the parameters; otherwise any new nodes created, replacing broken nodes or scaling up your number of nodes, will continue to create fluentd containers).
Alternatively, if you modify the configuration parameter and run upgrade.sh to upgrade your nodes to a newer version of Kubernetes then your nodes will not have the manifest file and you won't be running the fluentd container any longer.