Permanently STOP wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu 18.04

I just started an AWS Ubuntu 18.04 instance using their default image. I was surprised to see this process running:

$ ps auxww | grep wpa
root 792 0.0 0.2 45232 5380 ? Ss 15:43 0:00 /sbin/wpa_supplicant -u -s -O /run/wpa_supplicant

I believe this is to do with WIFI... well obviously AWS does not have WIFI on their instances, so how do I stop this useless process from starting on reboot?

2 Answers

sudo systemctl stop wpa_supplicant
sudo systemctl disable wpa_supplicant

Organic Marble's answer (at the time of this writing) didn't work for my system (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Raspberry Pi): after rebooting, the systemd journal (journalctl -f) was polluted with new wpa_supplicant ... log entries every couple of seconds again.

I also tried masking the service, but this also didn't work for me.

The only thing that helped was uninstalling the wpasupplicant package:

sudo apt remove wpasupplicant

After a reboot, finally wpa_supplicant ... systemd log entries don't show up anymore.