Networking between flex environment app engine and cluster engine?

Question

I can ping a VM started with 'create cluster' command from the app engine VM. However the names given to the cluster VMs are not user friendly (such as gke-mongo-cluster-default-pool-37e9b787-k7wl). I would like to assign a cleaner name to the VM - such as mongo-1 . When I deploy with deployment manager (say mongodb); I do get such cleaner names.

So the question is,

(1) How can I assign names to the VMs created under a gcloud cluster created with create-cluster command?

(2) Is there another way to map a name to an IP address within the project?

Thanks.

Answer 1

(1) How can I assign names to the VMs created under a gcloud cluster created with create-cluster command?

This isn't possible. The names are chosen for you by Google Container Engine and have names assigned such that the number of nodes in the cluster can be dynamically scaled up and down without creating naming conflicts.

It isn't clear why you are trying to ping a node directly. You can create a Kubernetes service running inside your GKE cluster that has a stable name that you can address.