I noticed all the nodes created by GKE have ephemeral external IPs.
Is this necessary and can it be disabled? I'd rather not expose all nodes publicly.
I noticed all the nodes created by GKE have ephemeral external IPs. Is this necessary?
Yes. GCE VMs need an external IP address to make outbound requests to the internet, which includes the GCE APIs. Without external IPs, the VMs wouldn't be able to connect to the cluster control plane (Kubernetes apiserver), docker hub, gcr.io, etc.
Can it be disabled?
Not at the current time.
Just a quick comment for the future traveler. This is still not possible as of today but they are working on it