An Agent Skill that gives AI coding agents expertise in Google Cloud Dedicated - Google's sovereign cloud platform. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, VS Code Copilot, and any other agent that supports the agentskills standard.
GCD is a separate product from public Google Cloud, running in isolated sovereign regions with strict data residency guarantees. Developers moving from GCP to GCD regularly hit differences in service availability, API endpoints, authentication, and tooling. This skill catches those issues before they become wasted hours.
When activated, the skill provides:
- GCD-specific guidance for architecture, authentication, Terraform, and developer tooling
- Automatic detection of public GCP patterns that won't work in GCD (wrong endpoints, unavailable services, missing universe domain config)
- Per-product difference details for all 16 available GCD services
- Region-agnostic advice - Berlin (
u-germany-northeast1) is the reference region, but the skill adapts to any GCD region
Clone the repo and symlink it into your project's .claude/skills/ directory:
# Clone the skill repo
git clone https://github.com/rochacbruno/gcd-claude-skill.git
# From your project root, create the skills directory and symlink
mkdir -p .claude/skills
ln -s /path/to/gcd-claude-skill .claude/skills/gcdThe skill activates automatically when Claude detects GCD-related work in that project. You can also invoke it directly with /gcd.
To share with your team, commit the symlink:
git add .claude/skills/gcd
git commit -m "Add GCD skill"Symlink into your personal skills directory so the skill is available across all projects:
git clone https://github.com/rochacbruno/gcd-claude-skill.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -s /path/to/gcd-claude-skill ~/.claude/skills/gcdThe repo includes a .claude-plugin/plugin.json manifest, so it can be loaded as a plugin:
# Load via additional directory
claude --add-dir /path/to/gcd-claude-skill
# Or place in skills dir and it auto-loads as a skills-directory plugin
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -s /path/to/gcd-claude-skill ~/.claude/skills/gcdClone the repo and place (or symlink) the SKILL.md and references/ directory where your agent discovers skills. The skill follows the open agentskills.io standard and requires no agent-specific configuration.
gcd-claude-skill/
SKILL.md # Main skill (agentskills standard)
.claude-plugin/
plugin.json # Claude Code plugin manifest
references/
overview.md # Architecture, regions, zones, sovereignty model
key-differences.md # Top-level GCD vs public GCP differences
services.md # Available services and limitations
product-differences.md # Per-product GCD vs GCP differences
authentication.md # Identity, credentials, ADC, tokens
developer-guide.md # gcloud CLI, client libraries, API endpoints
terraform.md # Terraform/IaC configuration for GCD
organization-setup.md # Org setup, IdP, Fabric FAST toolkit
quotas.md # Quota management, monitoring, CLI
gotchas.md # Critical pitfalls and common mistakes
scripts/
scrape-gcd-docs.py # Documentation scraper (Playwright)
docs-raw/ # Scraped raw docs (264 pages)
_manifest.json # Page inventory with metadata
_last_updated.json # Per-page last-updated dates
LICENSE # Apache-2.0
The skill's reference files are synthesized from 264 scraped pages covering the full GCD documentation site: 126 cross-cutting GCD docs, 16 product landing pages, 16 per-product tpc-differences pages, and 106 product sub-pages with GCD-specific content.
| Reference file | Pages covered | Content |
|---|---|---|
product-differences.md |
122 | Per-product GCD vs GCP differences, plus GCD-specific product sub-pages (Compute, BigQuery, Storage, IAM, GKE, DNS, KMS, Logging, Monitoring, Pub/Sub, etc.) |
terraform.md |
32 | Provider config, state storage, resources, best practices |
services.md |
29 | Product landing pages and Technology Area categories |
quotas.md |
28 | Quota management, monitoring, gcloud CLI examples |
authentication.md |
21 | Workforce Identity Federation, ADC, tokens, client libraries |
developer-guide.md |
20 | gcloud CLI setup, client libraries, API endpoints, Discovery API |
overview.md |
6 | Architecture, universes, regions, zones, billing, support |
organization-setup.md |
5 | Org setup paths (minimal/basic/enterprise), IdP, Fabric FAST |
key-differences.md |
1 | Comprehensive top-level GCD vs GCP differences |
gotchas.md |
-- | Synthesized from all sources |
Every item in the GCD docs "Technology Areas" menu is covered:
- Access and resource management
- Application development
- Application hosting
- Compute
- Data analytics
- Databases
- Networking technologies
- Observability and monitoring
- Security
- Storage
- Infrastructure as code
- SDK, languages, frameworks, and tools
Each available GCD service has its tpc-differences page plus GCD-specific sub-pages scraped and synthesized into references/product-differences.md:
| Product | Pages | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Access Context Manager | 8 | Landing, differences, access levels, policies |
| API Keys | 5 | Landing, differences, quotas, REST reference |
| Artifact Registry | 6 | Landing, differences, access control, quickstarts |
| BigQuery | 15 | Landing, differences, bq CLI, quotas, quickstarts, data loading |
| Compute Engine | 6 | Landing, differences, create VM, SSH, REST reference |
| Cloud DNS | 8 | Landing, differences, zones, records, policies |
| Cloud KMS | 8 | Landing, differences, key creation, import, retrieval |
| Cloud Logging | 10 | Landing, differences, audit, buckets, queries, log writing |
| Cloud Monitoring | 4 | Landing, differences, client libraries |
| Cloud SQL | 3 | Landing, differences, release notes |
| Google Kubernetes Engine | 9 | Landing, differences, cluster creation, workload identity |
| IAM | 15 | Landing, differences, roles, service accounts, custom roles |
| Pub/Sub | 11 | Landing, differences, topics, publishing, access control |
| Resource Manager | 11 | Landing, differences, projects, folders, tags |
| Service Usage | 9 | Landing, differences, enable/disable, setup |
| Cloud Storage | 10 | Landing, differences, bucket creation, uploads, APIs |
The scraper uses Playwright to render JS-heavy DevSite pages and tracks last-updated dates for each page.
uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install playwright
playwright install chromiumpython3 scripts/scrape-gcd-docs.pyThis re-scrapes all 264 pages into docs-raw/, updating _manifest.json and _last_updated.json. Compare _last_updated.json against a previous run to identify which pages changed.
After scraping, the reference files in references/ should be regenerated to incorporate any documentation updates.
Apache-2.0