How to use the DevOps Rollout Plan Generator agent skill

What is an agent skill and what does this one do?

An agent skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions that an AI agent loads when your request matches the skill's description. This skill is named devops-rollout-plan and its description is: generate comprehensive rollout plans with preflight checks, step-by-step deployment, verification signals, rollback procedures, and communication plans for infrastructure and application changes.

When you ask the agent to plan a change, the skill tells it to first gather details about the change, the environment, constraints and risks. It then produces a structured deployment document.

• Change description: what is changing, the version or state transition, and the problem it solves
• Environment: target (dev, staging, production), infrastructure type (Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, containers), affected services and capacity
• Constraints: acceptable downtime, change window limits, approvals and compliance needs
• Risk: blast radius, data or schema migrations, rollback complexity and known risks

What sections does the generated plan contain?

The skill's output format defines ten sections. They cover the executive summary, prerequisites and approvals, preflight checks, the step-by-step rollout procedure, verification signals, rollback procedure, communication plan, post-deployment tasks, contingency plans and contact information.

The verification signals are grouped by time: immediate (0-2 minutes), short-term (2-5 minutes), medium-term (5-15 minutes) and long-term (15+ minutes). The communication plan includes a stakeholder matrix showing who to notify, when, by what method and with what content.

How do you install the devops-rollout-plan skill?

Download the ZIP file for the skill from this page. The skill package contains a single file, SKILL.md. Unzip it so the skill folder sits in one of the locations below.

For a personal install that applies across your projects, place the folder in ~/.claude/skills/. To limit it to one project, place it in that project's .claude/skills/ folder.

If you use the Claude apps instead, open Settings, go to Capabilities, and upload the skill under Skills.

• Personal: ~/.claude/skills/devops-rollout-plan/
• Project only: .claude/skills/devops-rollout-plan/ inside your project
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills → upload

How do you trigger the skill with a natural request?

You do not need a special command. Describe the change in plain language and say you want a rollout or deployment plan. Include as much of the input details as you can, because the skill asks the agent to gather them before writing the plan. If something is missing, the agent should ask for it.

Good requests name the change, the environment and the risk. For example, you might write: help me plan a rollout of version 2.4 of our payments API to production on Kubernetes, with a 10-minute downtime limit and a database schema change.

• Plan a rollout of the new cache configuration to our staging VMs, with a rollback plan
• Write a deployment runbook for moving the orders service to a new container image in production
• Create a go/no-go checklist and rollback steps for a schema migration on our serverless backend

What should you check before using the output?

This skill only writes a plan. It does not deploy anything itself. The source notes that generated commands, including kubectl commands and rollback steps, are unverified for your system and could cause outages if run blindly. Read every command, confirm it against your own cluster, tooling and naming, and test rollback steps in a non-production environment first.

Approvals and contacts in the generated document are placeholders. For changes that need sign-off from compliance or security, your organisation must validate them.

• Do not run generated commands unattended in production
• Replace placeholder approvals and contacts with your real ones
• Confirm rollback steps work before the change window
• The skill's own guidance says to always have a tested rollback plan and never skip verification steps

What does the skill need to run?

The skill lists no required dependencies. It does not run scripts and does not use the network, according to its listing. The package contains only SKILL.md, so there is no separate script to review.

Because the skill writes text rather than acting on systems, the main risk is the quality of the commands and advice it produces, not the skill itself.

• Requires: nothing listed
• Runs scripts: no
• Uses network: no