Your team must create a VPC-native GKE cluster so pods receive IPs from your VPC subnet without extra host routes. Which action is required during cluster creation?

To ensure pods receive IPs directly from your VPC subnet without additional host routes, you must use VPC-native GKE. This requires reserving secondary IP ranges on the subnet where your cluster will reside. These secondary ranges are then used by GKE to allocate IP addresses to pods and services. During cluster creation, you explicitly enable VPC-native (IP alias) mode, which configures the cluster to leverage these secondary ranges for pod IP allocation. Creating host routes for each pod CIDR on every node is a manual and unscalable approach, not how VPC-native GKE operates. Relying on VPC firewall rules for IP assignment is incorrect; firewalls control traffic, not IP allocation. Cloud NAT is used for outbound internet connectivity for instances without external IPs, not for assigning internal pod IP addresses.