Red Hat announced on October 16, 2026, that its Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway for OpenShift is generally available as part of Red Hat Connectivity Link 1.5, following a technology preview. MCP is the protocol AI agents use to call external tools, and the gateway sits in front of MCP servers to route, filter and audit that traffic.
What’s new in the GA release
- Isolation for teams and tenants. You can run a fully separate gateway per team, or share one gateway with separate MCP router and broker components behind different paths such as
/mcp-team-aand/mcp-team-b. - Prompt and resource federation. The gateway now passes through MCP prompts and some resources from upstream servers, filtered by the same authorization rules as tools.
- Progressive tool discovery. Two meta-tools,
discover_toolsandselect_tools, let an agent browse lightweight metadata and then narrow its session to a working set, instead of loading every tool schema at once. - Stateless protocol support. The gateway handles the new 2026-07-28 MCP spec, which adds a stateless HTTP transport, alongside the 2025 versions on a single endpoint.
/mcpnegotiates automatically and/mcp/statefulforces the older behavior. - Observability. The router writes a structured audit log line for each tool call, and the broker exposes five new Prometheus metrics on port 9090 covering discovery, tool counts, connection failures and response sizes.
- Guardrails. Native integration with NeMo Guardrails checks tool-call requests and responses against configured policies.
- Console plug-in. A developer-preview OpenShift Console plug-in lets you set up gateways, register servers and test them with a built-in MCP inspector.
Why it matters for admins
As teams wire AI agents into internal systems, platform teams need the same controls they already apply to APIs: per-tenant routing, authorization, logs and metrics. Putting MCP behind a Kubernetes-native gateway with Prometheus metrics and CRDs like MCPServerRegistration makes agent tooling something you can manage with the same GitOps workflow as the rest of your OpenShift cluster.
Source: Red Hat Blog