Feature Request: Cloud Storage (GCS) Skill

[unrealandychan]

Feature Request: Cloud Storage (GCS) Skill

Summary

Google Cloud Storage is the foundational object storage service for nearly every GCP workload — yet there is currently no dedicated skill to guide agents (and users) on bucket provisioning, security hardening, lifecycle management, or integration patterns with other Google Cloud services.

The Gap

A typical agent workflow today:

User asks about storing files on GCP → Agent loads gcloud or cloud-run-basics skill → Guidance is fragmented and does not cover storage-specific concerns (IAM vs ACL, signed URLs, storage classes, CORS, etc.)

Without a dedicated gcs-basics skill, agents cannot reliably answer:

• Which storage class (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) fits a given retention and access pattern?
• How to generate signed URLs for temporary, secure public access?
• How to mount a GCS bucket as a file system in GKE (via CSI driver) or Cloud Run (via volume mounts)?
• How to enforce uniform bucket-level access and prevent ACL drift?
• How to set up object lifecycle rules to auto-transition or delete stale data?

Proposed Skill

A gcs-basics skill that agents load when users mention: Cloud Storage, GCS, bucket, object storage, file upload, signed URL, storage class, lifecycle policy, or CORS.

Suggested SKILL.md frontmatter

---
name: gcs-basics
description: >
  Use when the user asks about storing, retrieving, or managing objects on Google Cloud.
  Covers bucket creation, IAM/ACL permissions, storage class selection, lifecycle policies,
  signed URLs, CORS configuration, and integration with GKE (CSI), Cloud Run (volume mounts),
  and BigQuery (external tables). WHEN: create bucket, upload file, storage class, lifecycle
  rule, signed URL, CORS, GCS mount, GCS security, GCS cost optimization.
compatibility: Requires storage.objectViewer or storage.objectAdmin IAM role and the Cloud Storage API enabled.
---

Key reference topics

1. Golden Path Bucket Setup — uniform bucket-level access, IAM-only, no legacy ACLs
2. Storage Classes & Cost — decision matrix (Standard vs Nearline vs Coldline vs Archive), autoclass
3. Security — public access prevention, VPC Service Controls, encryption (CMEK vs Google-managed)
4. Integration Patterns
   • GKE: GCS Fuse CSI driver for pod volume mounts
   • Cloud Run: GCS volume mounts (second gen)
   • BigQuery: External tables over GCS (Parquet/ORC/CSV/JSON)
5. Signed URLs — V4 signing, expiration best practices, service account key vs workload identity
6. Lifecycle Management — transition rules, deletion rules, abort incomplete multipart upload
7. Performance — parallel composite uploads, turbo replication, dual-region buckets

Why Now?

• GCS is referenced implicitly by at least 5 existing skills (GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Firebase, Gemini API media upload) but never explained in depth.
• Agent Platform users increasingly ask about multi-modal pipelines where images, audio, and documents flow through Cloud Storage before reaching Gemini.
• The recent GCS FUSE and Cloud Run volume mount features are not documented in any existing skill.

Reference Implementation

Google Cloud official docs:

• https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs
• https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gcs-fuse-csi-driver
• https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/configuring/services/cloud-storage-volume-mounts

Happy to contribute a SKILL.md draft if this direction is accepted.

[vikramrk3]

Hey @unrealandychan Google Cloud Storage is working on this skill. Excited to bring more updates soon

By the way, we just released our own google cloud storage specific repo (https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/google-cloud-storage) which will contain more advanced skills :)

[vikramrk3]

@unrealandychan We released our google-cloud-storage-basics skill as a part of this repo! It covers the majority of the topics in your proposed frontmatter note that you can find most bigquery skills in the already existing bigquery-basics skill and their data-agent-kit.

By the way we are targeting an early August release for a few more advanced skills in out advanced repo. Please do check it out!

[vikramrk3]

https://github.com/google/skills/tree/main/skills/cloud/google-cloud-storage-basics