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The Application Load Balancer skill teaches agents to work with an Application Load Balancer as a product rather than as the objects it is stored in: create one, get the hostname to point DNS at, attach custom hostnames, add routes and the origins behind them, and configure traffic protection and authentication — all through datumctl alb. It also covers the policies the CLI does not wrap, for when you need WAF rule exclusions, rate limiting, circuit breaking or OIDC: TrafficProtectionPolicy, SecurityPolicy and BackendTrafficPolicy, attached via targetRefs.

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Install

Once installed, the skill activates automatically when you ask an agent to work with Application Load Balancer on Datum.
The skill teaches the datumctl alb commands, which come from a plugin that is not installed by default. Install it before an agent follows this skill, or every command it runs will fail:

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Capabilities

  • Create a load balancer and get the generated hostname to point DNS at
  • Attach custom hostnames and follow their verification, DNS and certificate progress
  • Add routes and the origins behind them, by URL or by network service
  • Configure traffic protection (WAF), request headers and basic authentication
  • Read access logs for one load balancer
  • Attach the advanced policies the CLI does not cover: WAF rule exclusions, rate limiting, circuit breaking, OIDC
  • Preview every change before applying it
It also teaches the three ways this API’s status misleads a naive reader — conditions that report on several hostnames without naming one, a condition that is true when something is wrong, and two reasons set true to mean “does not apply” — so an agent does not report a problem that is not there, or miss one that is. It does not cover metrics. There is no command for request rates, latency percentiles or error rates over time, so the skill sends people to the Metrics tab for that load balancer in the cloud portal instead of guessing from access logs.

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How it relates to other Datum surfaces

  • Product docs: Application Load Balancer — the human-facing reference for what an ALB is made of
  • Datum MCP: Datum MCP — for agents that need to read and write Datum resources during a session
  • Datum’s own assistant — a separate surface with read-only Application Load Balancer tools of its own, entitled through the platform catalog. It answers questions about a load balancer in the portal without anything being installed; this skill is for driving datumctl yourself
  • datumctl: datumctl overview — the datumctl alb commands the skill teaches agents to use, plus apply, diff and delete for the advanced policies

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View the full skill

The canonical SKILL.md lives in the datum-cloud/skills repo:

On GitHub

Browse the skill source, including frontmatter and full instructions.

Raw SKILL.md

Direct URL for agents that fetch skills by URL.
Last modified on August 4, 2026