gke-upgrades

GKE Upgrades & Maintenance is an operations runbook skill for planning, executing, and validating Google Kubernetes Engine cluster upgrades and maintenance across both Standard and Autopilot clusters. It solves the risk-heavy problem of Kubernetes version management: producing environment-specific upgrade plans, pre/post checklists, and maintenance runbooks with gcloud commands rather than generic advice.

The skill first gathers context (cluster mode, current/target versions and version skew, release channel, environment topology and rollout sequencing, and workload sensitivity), then applies core principles: sequential control-plane upgrades with skip-level node pools, control plane first, dev/staging before production, workload-aware strategy, release channels over deprecated static versioning, and canary ordering of node pools. It documents release-channel trade-offs (Rapid, Regular, Stable, Extended), node-pool strategies (surge and blue-green), PDB management, and rollback constraints. A troubleshooting reference walks stuck or failing upgrades in order, covering PDBs blocking drain, resource constraints, bare pods, admission webhooks, PVC attachment, long termination grace periods, GKE-level stalls, stockouts during time-critical upgrades (including credential rotation and DNS-endpoint enablement), and GPU driver regressions, each with diagnosis commands and fixes. A runbook template and checklists round out the deliverables.

It targets platform/SRE and DevOps engineers and cluster operators responsible for GKE lifecycle management. The commands it provides operate on the user's own clusters via gcloud and kubectl; some troubleshooting steps temporarily relax PDBs or remove admission webhooks during a maintenance window, which are standard, reversible operational remediations that the skill instructs to restore afterward.