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GKE Backup & Disaster Recovery

Guides an agent through configuring Backup for GKE backup plans, restores, and disaster recovery with gcloud

Source Download skill
Repository
google/skills
Stars
21,782
Licence
Apache-2.0
Files
2 files

What it does

Once installed, the agent knows how to set up Backup for GKE on Google Kubernetes Engine clusters: enabling the backup add-on, creating backup plans, triggering backups, and restoring a cluster or namespaces from a backup. It is steered toward safe choices, such as explicitly including volume data and secrets, encrypting backups with customer-managed keys, and avoiding restores into production without explicit confirmation. The skill itself is instructions and command examples; the agent would run the gcloud commands in a terminal if asked.

Great for

  • Platform or DevOps engineers protecting stateful workloads on GKE
  • Teams writing disaster recovery runbooks or backup policies for Kubernetes clusters
  • Engineers who need to restore GKE resources into a test cluster

Skip it if

  • Database backups (the skill says explicitly not to use it for these), since application data needs its own tools and quiescing
  • Restores into live production clusters without review: restore policies can overwrite or delete existing resources, including whole namespaces
  • Non-GKE environments or general Google Cloud Backup and DR service, which is a different product

Try asking

  • “Set up a daily Backup for GKE plan for the prod namespaces of my cluster with 30-day retention and CMEK encryption”
  • “Enable the BackupRestore add-on on my GKE cluster and create a backup plan that includes volume data and secrets”
  • “Restore the latest backup into a staging cluster and check the restore status”
  • “Explain the conflict policies before I restore resources into my cluster”
Step-by-step guide: how to use GKE Backup & Disaster RecoveryInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 2 original files, the Apache-2.0 licence and an attribution note.

    gke-backup-dr.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip gke-backup-dr.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip gke-backup-dr.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Always pass --include-volume-data and --include-secrets explicitly, since both default to false and omitting them silently produces config-only backups
  • Validate any restore in a non-production cluster first and review the conflict policy before running it against production
  • Ask the agent to use --selected-namespaces instead of --all-namespaces to limit scope

What's inside

  • references/attribution.md
  • SKILL.md

Redistributed unmodified from google/skills under the Apache-2.0 licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.