gke-upgrades

What problem does it solve?

GKE cluster upgrades involve complex coordination of version compatibility, workload safety, maintenance windows, and rollback procedures, with high risk of service disruption if mishandled. This Skill eliminates manual overhead and guesswork by providing structured, environment-specific guidance for all GKE lifecycle management tasks.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Upgrade Planning & Execution: Generates tailored upgrade plans, step-by-step runbooks with valid gcloud commands, and node pool upgrade strategies (surge, blue-green) for both Standard and Autopilot clusters.
• Maintenance Management: Provides guidance for release channel selection, maintenance window configuration, exclusion rules, and Rollout Sequencing to automate safe, scheduled upgrades across dev/staging/prod environments.
• Troubleshooting & Validation: Includes systematic checks for stuck upgrades, GPU/TPU workload compatibility, and pre/post-upgrade checklists to minimize downtime and ensure workload readiness. Use Case: If you need to upgrade a production GKE cluster running stateful databases and GPU workloads, this Skill creates a customized runbook with surge settings, PDB validation, and rollback procedures to avoid service disruption.

Quick Start

Use the gke-upgrades skill to create a complete upgrade plan and runbook for my production GKE Standard cluster running version 1.29, targeting version 1.30, with stateful PostgreSQL workloads and GPU node pools.