I created a branch from the tag: elasticsearch-cloud-kubernetes-1.3.0 to be able to create an image with ES 1.7.6 (we are migrating to docker but for now we are stuck with the version 1.7.X of ES)
The tag: elasticsearch-cloud-kubernetes-1.3.0 contains the ES lib 1.6.0 (this tag use the lib that is the closest one to 1.7.6) so no change required for the Java code.
But i needed to have the hand on the dockerfile and i wanted to use the existing maven file that you have in some earlier version.
So what I've done is to cherry pick pretty much everything from the tag elasticsearch-cloud-kubernetes-2.4.0_01 expect the java code and the elasticsearch.yml in order to have the latest way of building and pushing with maven and to be able to change the Dockerfile to install the ES version 1.7.6
All of it is working, I deployed it on Kubernetes.
I wanted to create a pull request from a fork, but I'm not sure you need what I've done and the master branch you have does not look appropriate for the base branch of the pull request.