GCE Machine Configuration
For more information about Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the Google Compute Engine (GCE), refer to the official GCP documentation.
Machine Type
The type of VM that will be deployed. Machine types determine the number of resources (vCPU, RAM, etc.) allocated for each node.
Network
The VPC network that the VM will be created in. This value cannot be changed once the machine pool has been provisioned.
Subnet
The VPC subnetwork that the VM will be created in. This value cannot be changed once the machine pool has been provisioned.
Allow Internal Communication
By default, a VPC firewall rule is automatically created to expose a fixed set of ports within the VPC to facilitate communication between cluster nodes. This behavior can be disabled on a per machine pool basis, when clicking the Show Advanced
option and disabling the Allow Internal Communication
checkbox.
Expose External ports
A list of ports to be opened externally to the wider internet. Open ports are defined at the machine pool level. Enabling this option will result in the automatic creation of a VPC firewall rule. This rule will be automatically deleted when the cluster or machine pool is deleted.
Network Tags
Tags is a list of network tags, which can be used to associate preexisting Firewall Rules with all VMs within a machine pool.
Labels
A comma-separated list of custom labels to be attached to all VMs within a given machine pool. Unlike Tags, Labels do not influence networking behavior and only serve to organize cloud resources.
Advanced Options
When creating clusters via the Rancher UI some options are automatically configured for you. However, when creating machine config objects manually, you must ensure you properly configure the below fields.
external-firewall-rule-prefix
A prefix that will be used when creating the firewall rule to expose ports publicly. Ideally, this should be a concatenation the machine pool name and the cluster name. This field must be set if the machine pool is configured to expose ports publicly, otherwise it can be omitted.