Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gke-labs/kube-agentsnpx agentmods add skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgradesWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgrades)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgrades"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgrades/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgrades"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gke-labs/kube-agents/gke-upgrades.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00202 | $0.04085 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00101 | $0.02042 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00040 | $0.00817 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00409 |
Grade A, and why
gke-upgrades scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured today.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
GKE Upgrades & Maintenance
Produce clear, actionable documents — upgrade plans, runbooks, or checklists — tailored to the user's environment. Output should be specific to their cluster mode, release channel, version, and workload types rather than generic advice.
Always frame guidance around the auto-upgrade model: auto-upgrade with maintenance windows and exclusions is the preferred control mechanism.
Context Gathering
Before producing any upgrade artifact, establish:
- Cluster mode — Standard or Autopilot? (Autopilot has no node pool management, mandatory resource requests, no SSH)
- Current and target versions — Node version skew must be within 2 minor versions of control plane.
- Release channel — Rapid, Regular, Stable, or Extended.
- Environment topology & Rollout Sequencing — Single vs multi-cluster, dev/staging/prod tiers, and whether Rollout Sequencing is used.
- Workload sensitivity — StatefulSets, databases, GPU, long-running batch need special handling.
If the user provides these upfront, skip straight to the deliverable. If they're vague, fill in reasonable defaults and flag assumptions.
Core Principles
GKE versions follow Kubernetes version terminology: Major.Minor.Patch (e.g., 1.30.1-gke.1187000). A Minor version bump (e.g., 1.29 → 1.30) introduces new features and APIs. A Patch version bump (e.g., 1.30.1 → 1.30.2) introduces security and bug fixes. Ensure the user understands this distinction.
- Sequential control plane, skip-level node pools -- Control plane upgrades are sequential (N → N+1 → N+2). Node pools support skip-level (N+2) upgrades.
- Control plane first -- Control plane must be upgraded before node pools. Nodes can trail by up to 2 minor versions.
- Environment progression -- Always upgrade dev/staging before production. Use Rollout Sequencing (preferred) to automate and enforce this progression across environments (e.g., dev → staging → prod), or manually coordinate version progression if Rollout Sequencing is not used.
- Workload-aware -- Upgrade strategy depends on what's running (stateless, stateful, GPU, batch).
- Release channels first -- Always recommend release channels. Note that "No channel" (static versioning) is deprecated and clusters should be migrated to release channels.
- Rollback/Downgrade -- Control Plane patches and Node Pools (minor and patches) can be rolled back (downgraded to a target version). GKE supports a 2-step Control Plane minor upgrade where step 1 is rollbackable. Other Control Plane minor version rollbacks are NOT customer-doable and require GKE Support.
- Node pool upgrade ordering -- When upgrading multiple node pools, always recommend sequential ordering: upgrade non-critical/stateless pools first (acting as a canary) to verify cluster health before upgrading critical stateful (database) or GPU pools.
What ships with it
3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- today Changed · +19 lines dc7e1be7e0be
- 9d ago First seen · 212 lines · 202 tokens per session scan A fc2955296cb4
gke-upgrades is a skill published in the GitHub repository gke-labs/kube-agents (54 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 202 tokens to every session and 4,085 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.
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