Google Cloud Storage Skills

This repository contains a growing collection of Agent Skills for Google Cloud Storage. These skills deliver vetted GCS expertise directly into your coding agent, letting you use natural language prompts in your preferred CLI or IDE to work with your storage resources — from everyday bucket and object management to file-system mounts with Cloud Storage FUSE, access-error diagnostics, security assessments, and infrastructure code generation.

[!NOTE] This repository is under active development. More skills will be added over time.

[!IMPORTANT] We Want Your Feedback! Please share your thoughts with us by opening an issue on GitHub. Your input is invaluable and helps us improve the project for everyone.

Contents

• Installation
• Available Skills
• Prerequisites
• Authentication
• Additional Setup: GCS Security Assessment
• Example Use Cases
• Security Reminder: Agent Environment Hardening
• Support
• Contributing
• License

Installation

Installing using open agent skills tool

npx skills add gemini-cli-extensions/google-cloud-storage

From the npx install command, you can select the specific skills from this repo to install. The skills work with any compatible coding agent, including Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity CLI.

Installing via a compatible Agent Plugins client

This repository is also a valid Agent Plugins (v1) plugin. Any Agent Plugins–compatible client (VS Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Kiro, …) can install it directly using its own built-in plugin command, by pointing at this repository:

https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/google-cloud-storage

Available Skills

• Google Cloud Storage Basics — Everyday GCS expertise: create and configure buckets; upload, download, and transfer data; control access; manage storage classes, lifecycle, cost, and data protection — via the gcloud CLI, JSON/XML APIs, client libraries, Terraform, or Cloud Storage MCP servers.
• Google Cloud Storage Bucket Architect — Creates Google Cloud Storage (GCS) buckets: analyzes the workload (sensitive data, media hosting, ingestion, web hosting, archiving, backup, logging, analytics, AI/ML, or general-purpose), validates project-level security settings, and designs a secure-by-default, cost-effective configuration (location, storage class, security, lifecycle) before creating it via gcloud, JSON/REST API, Terraform, or SDK client libraries (C++, Java, Python, and Go).
• Google Cloud Storage FUSE — Mount buckets as a POSIX file system with gcsfuse: decide when to use FUSE vs. direct storage reads, deploy tuned mounts on GKE, Compute Engine, and Cloud Run, size the file, stat, and list caches, keep file writes and ML checkpointing safe, and diagnose slow or costly mounts with gcsfuse metrics.
• Google Cloud Storage Diagnostic — Root-cause access failures: diagnose 403 Permission Denied and other access errors by analyzing IAM policy bindings, ACLs, Uniform Bucket-Level Access, Bucket-Level IP Filtering, and VPC Service Controls perimeters, then walk through a verified fix.
• GCS Security Assessment — Assess the security posture of GCS projects and buckets against Google's Secure AI Framework (SAIF): correlate real telemetry signals to surface toxic combinations of vulnerabilities — scenarios where individually low-risk configurations combine into a critical exposure — with actionable, verified remediation. Needs additional setup for a complete assessment.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following:

• A Google Cloud project with the resources you want to work with.
• Google Cloud SDK (gcloud CLI): Install and initialize the gcloud CLI and ensure Application Default Credentials (ADC) are configured.
• A compatible coding agent, such as Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex, or Antigravity CLI.

Authentication

Before using the skills, authenticate with Google Cloud so your agent can read your storage resources and run any changes you approve. It is recommended to run both of the following commands:

gcloud auth login
gcloud auth application-default login

• gcloud auth application-default login is required: skill scripts use Application Default Credentials (ADC) to generate access tokens for GCP API calls.
• gcloud auth login allows the agent (or you) to run standard gcloud commands to explore configurations or dig deeper into specific resources beyond what the skill scripts cover.

Additional Setup: GCS Security Assessment

The GCS Security Assessment skill runs with nothing more than working Application Default Credentials (see Authentication) — there is no required IAM permission. However, signals the skill cannot read are reported as UNKNOWN, so for a complete assessment grant the recommended read-only roles covering Storage Insights telemetry (bucket/object analysis) and project-level posture (IAM and audit config, org policies, VPC Service Controls, and Model Armor). See PERMISSIONS.md for the full permission tables and a ready-to-apply custom IAM role (gcs-security-assessment-role.yaml).

[!TIP] For the best analysis, we highly recommend being a Storage Intelligence customer. When Storage Intelligence is enabled, the skill can query your Storage Insights datasets to perform deep, bucket-level and object-level assessments. Without it, the skill falls back to a project-level assessment only.

The other skills need no permissions beyond the prerequisites and whatever IAM access your identity already has to the buckets you work with.

Example Use Cases

The skills cover the full storage lifecycle — provisioning, data movement, file-system access, access control, troubleshooting, protection and compliance, cost, security, and automation. Interact with Google Cloud Storage using natural language, right from your coding agent:

Design and provision storage for any workload

• Quick start: "Create a new GCS bucket named 'audio-video-assets' in the 'my-gcp-project' project"
• Sensitive data: "Create a secure GCS bucket to store PII and other sensitive data. Make sure the data is protected against exfiltration and unauthorized public exposure"
• Media serving: "I am building a high-performance media streaming service that delivers millions of high-definition images and videos to a global audience. Set up a Cloud Storage bucket as the origin, paired with a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), to minimize latency and ensure optimal streaming performance at scale"
• AI/ML workloads: "I have a large-scale model training and checkpointing use case. Help me set up GCS to optimize performance"

Mount buckets as a file system

• Workload fit: "Should my ML training workload use Cloud Storage FUSE, native gs:// reads, or Filestore? It reads millions of small files every epoch"
• Tuned mounts: "Help me mount the 'ml-datasets' bucket as a local file system with gcsfuse, with mount options tuned for high-throughput model training"
• GKE deployment: "Deploy a gcsfuse mount on my GKE training cluster with the CSI driver, with caches sized for repeated reads of the training dataset"
• Performance diagnosis: "My training job reads from a gcsfuse mount and GPU utilization is low. Diagnose whether the mount is the bottleneck and tune it"
• Cost diagnosis: "My GCS bill spiked after we moved to gcsfuse. Figure out which mount options are causing the excess operations"

Move, replicate, and migrate data at scale

• Cloud migration: "Migrate the data in my S3 bucket 'legacy-exports' into a new GCS bucket"
• Disaster recovery: "Set up continuous replication of bucket 'ops-bucket' to bucket 'vault-bucket-isolated', and ensure all the existing historical data is copied as well"
• Zero-downtime moves: "Relocate my 'analytics-archive' bucket from us-east1 to us-central1 without downtime"

Control who can access your data

• Temporary sharing: "How can I temporarily give one of my users access to upload a large video to my bucket?"
• Least privilege: "Give the analytics team read-only access to the 'reports' bucket without granting them anything else in the project"

Diagnose and fix access errors

• 403 Permission Denied: "User alice@example.com is getting a 403 Permission Denied when trying to list objects in gs://my-team-bucket. Help me diagnose and fix it"
• Confusing denials: "Diagnose why reading gs://data-bucket/object.txt fails even though I have object viewer permissions"
• IP filtering lockout: "I am getting a 403 error on gs://my-secure-bucket due to IP filtering restrictions"
• Service agents: "Pub/Sub notifications on my bucket stopped working after we enabled CMEK. Check whether the service agents have the right permissions"

Protect data and meet compliance requirements

• Recovery: "I accidentally deleted objects from the 'prod-reports' bucket. Can I get them back?"
• Immutability: "Configure my 'audit-logs' bucket so objects cannot be deleted or modified for 7 years"

Optimize storage costs

• Cost analysis: "Analyze my buckets and recommend storage classes and lifecycle rules to reduce storage costs"
• Usage insight: "Find my largest and least-accessed datasets across all buckets in the project"

Assess and harden your security posture

• Targeted assessment: "Assess the security posture of buckets [BUCKET_1], [BUCKET_2] in project [PROJECT_ID]"
• Project-wide assessment: "Run a security assessment of project [PROJECT_ID] and show me the exact commands to remediate any toxic combinations you find"
• Follow-up investigation: "Explain why the 'ml-training-data' bucket is flagged as a toxic combination, and show me the exact command to remediate the public access finding"

Generate infrastructure and application code

• Terraform: "Generate a Terraform configuration to provision a GCS bucket in us-central1 for application logs. Make sure public access is prevented and Uniform Bucket-Level Access is enabled, and add a lifecycle rule to transition logs to Nearline storage after 30 days and delete them after 365 days"
• Client libraries: "Generate Java code to upload a local directory to my 'app-backups' bucket in parallel using the Cloud Storage client library"

Set up and secure Cloud Storage MCP servers

• Guarded setup: "Set up the Cloud Storage MCP server for my coding agent, and integrate Model Armor with it to screen tool calls for prompt injection"
• Authentication and tools: "How do I authenticate and authorize with the remote Cloud Storage MCP server, and what tools are available on it?"
• Choosing a server: "For downloading large files from my buckets, which Cloud Storage MCP server should I use?"
• Read-only enforcement: "Lock down the Cloud Storage remote MCP server with an IAM deny policy so my agent can only call read-only tools"

Build event-driven and AI-powered workflows

• Event notifications: "Send a Pub/Sub notification whenever new objects land in my 'ingest' bucket so my pipeline can process them"
• Agentic workflows: "Scan the 'retail-raw-products' bucket for assets related to 'ProductX', draft a promotional social media campaign listing, and write the draft output file to bucket 'retail-campaigns'"

Security Reminder: Agent Environment Hardening

Your agent can execute tools and commands on your behalf. Protect your Google Cloud resources by enforcing The Principle of Least Privilege across all CLIs, MCP servers and other resources available to your agents.

• Service Accounts: Use service accounts instead of end user credentials to access Google Cloud resources.
• Limited Permissions: Assign roles with limited permissions to the service account that you're using for authentication.
• Principal Access Boundaries: Prevent unwanted cross-org agent access by using Principal Access Boundary policies to scope your agent to projects you intend it to access.
• Include a condition in the policy binding to ensure that the policy only applies to the service accounts that you intend to restrict.

You can read more here on how to mitigate prompt injection attacks with Google Cloud MCP.

Support

If you need help or encounter issues with these skills, search for existing issues or open a new one in the GitHub Issue Tracker.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to improve these skills. You can help by:

• Reporting bugs or inaccuracies in the skill files.
• Suggesting new skills to add to this repository by filing a feature request.

License

You are free to copy, modify, and distribute these skills under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.