Foundational platform engineering knowledge from key references -- Continuous Delivery, SRE, Accelerate, Team Topologies, Chaos Engineering, and Secure Delivery. Load when contextual grounding in platform engineering theory is needed.
SkillScore87Maintained
On-demandOn-demand: invoked explicitly — never occupies your agent's context until called.
◆DevOps & SRE pack
Last verified 8/16/2026
What it changes
Passed 20 of 23 test cases with the skill, and 17 of 23 without it.
Without skill74%
With skill87%
Checks it passed that the model alone missed
Includes the markdown heading level three Decision Rules
Includes the markdown heading level three Constraint-Free Baseline
Includes the markdown heading level two Platform Constraint Impact Analysis
and 2 more in the full report
3 fixed17 passed either way3 still failing0 broke
Pass-rate lift
+13 pp
Tokens
+20%
Agent turns
0%
Response time
-25%
Model gemini-3.6-flashMeasured 8/16/2026v120 of 23 cases passed with skill
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
See it in action
One of 3 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
1 of 3
Prompt
Our delivery audit shows manual DNS allocation delays affect approximately 12% of infrastructure provision requests. How should this bottleneck be handled according to platform constraint decision rules?
What was checked, without and with the skill
Checked
Without skill
With skill
Recommends considering deferring the constraint because it affects less than 20% of delivery
Missed
Passed
case-18 · gemini-3.6-flash · 8/16/2026 · answers are capped and redacted
What's inside
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
SKILL.md90 linessingle file
Platform Engineering Foundations
Continuous Delivery (Humble and Farley)
Key principles: Build quality in | Work in small batches | Automate almost everything | Pursue continuous improvement | Everyone is responsible (shared ownership).
Pipeline progression: Commit -> Acceptance -> Capacity -> Production stages. For detailed stage definitions and quality gates, see cicd-and-deployment skill.
Site Reliability Engineering (Google -- Beyer et al.)
Key principles: SLOs over SLAs (internal targets stricter than external) | Error budgets (balance reliability and velocity) | Toil elimination (automate repetitive manual work) | Embrace risk (calculate risk, do not eliminate it).
Observability: Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) | SLI -> SLO -> Error Budget -> Alerting chain | Dashboards for investigation, not monitoring.
Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, Kim)
DORA Metrics
Deployment frequency: how often code deploys to production
Lead time for changes: time from commit to production
Change failure rate: % of deployments causing failure
Time to restore: time to recover from production failure
Performance Levels
Metric
Elite
High
Deployment frequency
Multiple times/day
Daily to weekly
Lead time
< 1 hour
1 day to 1 week
Change failure rate
0-15%
16-30%
Time to restore
< 1 hour
< 1 day
Use DORA metrics as baselines when assessing current state and setting improvement targets.
Team Topologies (Skelton and Pais)
Team Types
Stream-aligned: delivers value to customer, owns full lifecycle
Monitoring, observability, operational procedures, CI/CD lessons learned, and quality gate definitions. Load when assessing production readiness or validating operational excellence.