I have created a k8s cluster on GCP. And then I installed kubectl tool and Google Cloud SDK locally. Other than that I have done no extra configuration. I just added kubectl location to system path.
Now when I do 'kubetcl get pods', it fetches me the list of pods deployed in GCP cluster.
But how does kubectl know about that cluster? I surely didn't provide any information to it.
If you want to use kubectl to interact with the cluster, then you need to update cluster details in kube config. The config file is probably have a file named config in the $HOME/.kube directory.
Please refer here
Kubectl uses a Kubeconfig file which has a server attribute with the IP or hostname of the Kubernetes API server hosted in GCP.
By default, kubectl looks for a file named config in the $HOME/.kube directory. You can specify other kubeconfig files by setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable or by setting the --kubeconfig flag.
From the docs here gcloud command automatically updates the kubeconfig file with correct API Server address and other parameters.