I fiddled around with kubernetes and GKE and found it way to complicated for a simple Docker installation (in this case: a customized Wordpress container and mariadb as DB-container) so I created a VM on Compute engine (debian jessie) installed docker 1.11.2 and docker-compose. To get access to gcr.io I also installed glcoud. I added a firewall rule to get access to port 8080.
Everything works fine - The whole thing was up and running in ~15mins
My question now is: Is it appropriate / secure to install gcloud on the host vm???
It's perfectly fine to install gcloud on the host VM. I actually thought that it was preinstalled on most GCE images, so it's interesting to hear that it wasn't.