I am in the process of learning Kubernetes with a view to setting up a simple cluster with Citus DB and I'm having a little trouble with getting things going, so would be grateful for any help.

I have a docker image containing my base debian image configured for Citus for the project, and I want to set it up at this point with one master, that should mount a GCP master disk with a Postgres DB that I'll then distribute among the other containers, each mounted with a individual separate disk with empty tables (configured with the Citus extension) to hold what gets distributed to each. I'd like to automate this further at some point, but now I'm aiming for just a master container, and eight nodes. My plan is to create a deployment that opens port 5432 and 80 on each node, and I thought that I can create two pods, one to hold the master and one to hold the eight nodes. Ideally I'd want to mount all the disks and then run a post-mount script on the master that will find all the node containers (by IP or hostname??), add them as Citus nodes, then run create_distributed_table to distribute the data.

My confusion at present is about how to label all the individual nodes so they will keep their internal address or hostname and so in the case of one going down it will be replaced and resume with the data on the PD. I've read about ConfigMaps and setting hostname aliases but I'm still unclear about how to proceed. Is this possible, or is this the wrong way to approach this kind of setup?