APEX Skills — Agentic Platform Engineering eXperience

Curated platform-engineering skills that compress onboarding from months to weeks. Domain knowledge authored by senior AWS SSAs, TAMs, and ProServe, delivered through agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Kiro CLI etc).

APEX uses agentic AI (frontier models and agent harness like Claude Code) combined with curated "skills" to give engineers SSA-grade platform engineering output.

Agent Skills are organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that frontier LLM models can discover and load dynamically to perform specialized tasks. By codifying expert platform engineering knowledge as Agent Skills, we amplify best practices and scale them across teams while reducing toil. They follow the Agent Skills Agent Skills open standard open standard and are compatible with any supported agent harness.

What's in This Repo

sample-apex-skills/
├── skills/       → 📚 Domain knowledge (platform-engineering best practices, Terraform, skill creation)
├── steering/     → 🎯 Guided workflows (optional — structured engagement playbooks)
├── examples/     → 🏗️ Hands-on exercises (deployable labs with planted issues)
└── misc/         → 🔧 Maintenance and tooling
    ├── evals/    → 🧪 Per-skill evaluation inputs (triggering + task prompts)
    └── (scripts) → Sync skills from sources, update cross-references

Key principle: Skills provide the knowledge. Steering provides the structure.

Quick Start

Option A: Just the Skills

Use the skills with any agent that supports the Agent Skills standard. Skills are self-contained — clone and point your tool at them.

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-apex-skills.git
cd sample-apex-skills

Each skill lives in skills/{skill-name}/ with a SKILL.md (frontmatter + instructions) and optional references/, scripts/, and assets/ directories. See skills/README.md for details.

Option B: Skills + Steering (Guided Experience)

For a structured engagement experience — where the agent follows a questionnaire, enforces checkpoints, and validates output quality — add the steering files.

Claude Code

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-apex-skills.git
cd sample-apex-skills

# One-time setup — symlink skills, steering + commands into .claude/
mkdir -p .claude/skills .claude/commands
for skill in skills/*/; do ln -sfn "../../$skill" ".claude/skills/$(basename $skill)"; done
ln -sfn ../../steering/commands/apex .claude/commands/apex
ln -sfn ../steering .claude/steering

# Make steering available at a fixed absolute path for slash commands
ln -sfn "$(pwd)/steering" ~/.claude/apex-steering

Claude Code walks up to the git root to find .claude/, so commands work from any subdirectory in the repo. The ~/.claude/apex-steering symlink gives slash commands an absolute path to load steering files instantly.

Usage:

1. Start a Claude Code session from anywhere in the repo
2. Use slash commands:
   • /apex:eks — hub that auto-routes based on your request
   • /apex:eks-design — "Help me design an EKS cluster"
   • /apex:eks-upgrade-check — "Is my cluster ready to upgrade to 1.32?"

Kiro CLI

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-apex-skills.git
cd sample-apex-skills

# Skills — symlink into .kiro/skills/
mkdir -p .kiro/skills
for skill in skills/*/; do
  name=$(basename "$skill")
  ln -sfn "../../skills/$name" ".kiro/skills/$name"
done

# Steering — copy for Kiro IDE slash commands
mkdir -p .kiro/steering
cp steering/eks.md .kiro/steering/eks.md

Usage:

kiro-cli chat
# Then in the session:
/model claude-opus-4.5
/context add steering/eks.md
# Ask: "Help me design an EKS cluster"

Skills Reference

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-skills-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

Steering (Optional)

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-steering-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

Slash Commands (Claude Code)

Steering files control how the agent runs an engagement — they don't contain domain knowledge (that's in skills), but define the interaction pattern. The hub (eks.md) is the entry point — it detects what the user wants and routes to the appropriate workflow. Each workflow follows a structured sequence with checkpoints and STOP gates. The commands/ directory provides agent-harness-specific entry points (e.g., Claude Code slash commands) that map to the hub and workflows.

The key test: If you removed all steering files, would the agent still know the right answers? Yes — skills provide the knowledge. But the agent wouldn't know how to run the engagement.

Examples

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-examples-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on:

• Where new content goes (skills vs steering vs examples)
• How to create a new skill
• How to create a new steering workflow
• How to create a new example
• How to add evals for a new skill

Sources

All best practices content is sourced from public AWS documentation:

• AWS EKS Best Practices Guide
• AWS Prescriptive Guidance — HA and Resiliency for EKS
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks
• ArgoCD Documentation
• EKS Workshop
• AWS EKS Capabilities

License

This project is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.