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