How to use the GKE Upgrade Planner agent skill (gke-upgrades)

What the gke-upgrades skill makes the agent do

Once installed, the agent produces GKE upgrade artifacts: upgrade plans, pre- and post-upgrade checklists, maintenance runbooks containing gcloud commands, release channel strategy advice and troubleshooting guides. The output is tailored to your cluster mode (Standard or Autopilot), current and target versions, release channel, environment layout and workload types, rather than generic advice.

The skill prefers auto-upgrade with maintenance windows and exclusions as the control method, and it explains the difference between minor version bumps (new features and APIs) and patch bumps (security and bug fixes). It also covers node pool strategies such as surge and blue-green upgrades, and PDB handling.

Install the gke-upgrades skill

Download the ZIP file for the skill from this page. Then choose one of two options.

For a personal install, unzip it into ~/.claude/skills/. For a single project, unzip it into the project's .claude/skills/ folder so it applies only to that repository.

Alternatively, upload the ZIP in the Claude apps under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

• Personal: ~/.claude/skills/
• Project: .claude/skills/ inside your project
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills, then upload the ZIP

Check what you need before you start

The skill generates commands that you run yourself, so you need the Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) installed, access to the GKE cluster, and Google Cloud IAM permissions that allow the actions in the commands. The skill's files do not specify the exact IAM roles, so confirm them with your Google Cloud administrator.

The skill also asks for context when it is missing: cluster mode, current and target versions, release channel (Rapid, Regular, Stable or Extended), environment topology and workload sensitivity such as StatefulSets, GPUs or batch jobs. If you give these upfront, the agent skips straight to the deliverable.

• Google Cloud SDK (gcloud)
• Access to the GKE cluster
• Google Cloud IAM permissions for the target actions (not specified in the skill files)

Trigger the skill with natural requests

You do not need a special command. Describe the task in plain language and mention GKE upgrades, Kubernetes version bumps, maintenance windows, release channels, surge upgrades or a stuck upgrade. The skill is written to respond to casual phrasing too.

Good requests include the environment details, so the output is specific to your situation.

• "We need to upgrade our Standard GKE clusters from 1.29 to 1.30 next month. Write a pre-upgrade checklist."
• "Plan our next GKE maintenance window for the prod cluster on the Regular channel."
• "Our GKE node pool upgrade is stuck. Give me troubleshooting steps."
• "Write a runbook with gcloud commands for upgrading the control plane, then the stateless node pools."

Review every command before running it

The skill can direct terminal gcloud commands that change live clusters. Read each command, confirm the cluster name, zone and target version, and run it in a non-production cluster first where possible. The skill's guidance says to upgrade dev and staging before production and to upgrade non-critical node pools before stateful or GPU pools.

The skill's attribution rules tell the agent to prefix terminal gcloud commands with a metrics environment variable that identifies the skill. Expect to see this prefix in commands the agent runs. The skill's files also include a script-execution and network component, so review what runs on your machine.

• Do not run generated upgrade commands unattended in production.
• Confirm the zone, cluster name and target version before each step.
• Use the rollback guidance in the runbook template before you start a minor upgrade.