I am a noob with regards to Docker/containers. My exposure has been a few hours of course videos and labs on Google Cloud with GKE.

From what I understand conceptually the whole point of k8s/dockers, is the convenience of not having to manage the containers (and by extension their IP addresses). Pinging the containers in essence is like managing the containers. The external environment that makes use of the containers should not try to be bound to a particular IP as there is no guarantee it will always be the same (pods can be shut down and brought up by the control plane).

Assuming I am wrong with the paragraph above; and that there is a use-case for pinging/managing the containers; should not this be more of a docker issue rather a Workstation Pro issue? On GKE, one would use the kubectl command so presumably with Docker you would use the docker command.