I've done quite a bit of research and have yet to find an answer to this. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish:
So I'm wondering if I'm going about this the wrong way, and what is the best way to architect this solution to allow for persistent data in ES when my cluster/nodes autoscale.
Persistent Volumes have access semantics. on GCE I'm assuming you are using a Persistent Disk, which can either be mounted as writable to a single pod or to multiple pods as read-only. If you want multi writer semantics, you need to setup Nfs or some other storage that let's you write from multiple pods.
In case you are interested in running NFS - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/release-1.2/examples/nfs/README.md
FYI: We are still working on supporting auto-provisioning of PVs as you scale your deployment. As of now it is a manual process.