Red Hat ships production MCP gateway for OpenShift AI agent traffic

The MCP gateway exits technology preview as part of Red Hat Connectivity Link 1.5, adding enterprise controls for AI agent infrastructure on OpenShift. New capabilities include gateway and server-level traffic isolation for multi-tenant deployments, support for the 2026 stateless MCP protocol alongside earlier versions, progressive tool discovery to manage large tool catalogs, and native NeMo guardrails integration for request/response safety screening. The release also adds structured audit logging, Prometheus metrics for broker health, and an OpenShift console plugin.

What's in the GA MCP gateway

• Gateway isolation: Two isolation modes—dedicated gateway instances per tenant, or shared gateway with separate listener endpoints (e.g., /mcp-team-a, /mcp-team-b) and isolated routing components
• Protocol versioning: Single endpoint supports MCP 2025 stateful versions (2025-11-25, 2025-06-18, 2025-03-26) and 2026 stateless HTTP transport; /mcp auto-negotiates, /mcp/stateful forces older protocol
• Progressive tool discovery: discover_tools and select_tools meta-tools let agents browse lightweight metadata before scoping to a working tool set; stateful-only feature
• Prompt and resource federation: Upstream MCP prompts federated with prompts/list and prompts/get; resources/list and resources/read for ui:// resources; both filtered via JWT allowed-capabilities claims
• NeMo guardrails: Request/response body screening independent of auth; configured via annotated Secrets on MCPGatewayExtension and MCPServerRegistration resources
• Observability: Structured audit logs with audit=true, JWT subject, tool/server names, status; 5 Prometheus metrics on broker:9090 covering discovery, tool inventory, connection failures, response sizes

Why it matters

The GA release signals growing enterprise investment in MCP as a standard for AI agent interoperability, with Red Hat positioning OpenShift as a governed, multi-tenant platform for AgentOps workloads. Stateless protocol support addresses horizontal scaling limitations that have constrained serverless MCP deployments.