# Red Hat ships production MCP gateway for OpenShift AI agent traffic

> **Key takeaway:** Red Hat Connectivity Link 1.5 brings a generally available Model Context Protocol gateway with multi-tenant isolation, stateless protocol support, and NeMo guardrails integration for governing AI agent tool traffic at scale.

**Published:** 2026-10-16T00:00:00+00:00 
**Source:** Red Hat Blog 
**Category:** distro-news 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/red-hat-ships-production-mcp-gateway-for-openshift-ai-agent-.html 

## Summary
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.