Are instances of the Google Container Engine available through DNS?

Question

Google AppEngine applications are automatically accessible via DNS in a predictable location ( appname.appspot.com ). Is the same true for instances of the Google Container Engine?

Just giving the GKE instances a public IP address, but that won't work if you want to share demo links (without worrying that they will change) or use Google OAuth (which doesn't allow static IP addresses as callback URLs).

I can register a domain and set up subdomains to specify an IP for each container instance using Google Cloud DNS. But it would be easier if GKE did it already!

Answer 1

The Google Container Engine does not automatically bind the DNS host name to the main endpoint or to any application that you run in your cluster.

Instances (virtual machines) in the cluster have public IP addresses (and you can open the firewall rules to make them public), but you should usually access the services (which represent the applications), and not the instances directly.

Services for which an external load balancer (L3 or L7) is created will have a public IP address, but will not automatically receive the associated DNS name.

App Engine maintains a 1: 1 ratio between the application (where you select a globally unique name when creating, if you want the appspot.com domain) and your deployed code.

Container Engine allows you to deploy multiple "applications" in one cluster and does not require registration of a globally unique name when creating a cluster or creating a service. This gives you more flexibility, but also means that if you want to map the DNS name in your application, you have to do it yourself.

It would be unreasonable to expect that the Ingress controller (used to create L7 services) will help simplify this process, but today it does not. Feel free to submit a function request on github .