Deployment, Scaling, Versioning, and Operations
Practice this questionWANT TO UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT FIRST?Learn Deployment, Scaling, Versioning, and Operations
Local versus remote
| Concern | Local stdio | Remote Streamable HTTP |
|---|---|---|
| Users | Usually one local user | Multiple users are possible. |
| Auth | Process/OS/configuration boundary | Token-based authentication and policy |
| Scaling | One process per host | Horizontal service scaling |
| Operations | Client starts the process | Deployment, TLS, monitoring |
Production checklist
- Run the container as a non-root user with minimal filesystem and network access.
- Enable HTTPS/TLS and strict Host/Origin handling.
- Make health checks dependency-aware without leaking details.
- Prefer stateless handlers when session state is unnecessary.
- Design session state, an event bus, or resumability storage before horizontal scaling.
- Configure timeouts, payload limits, concurrency limits, and graceful shutdown.
- Run type checking, tests, security checks, and container scanning in CI.
- Test protocol and SDK changes against supported clients.
- Provide feature flags and a rollback path.
- Maintain a runbook that defines the alert owner, incident response, and credential rotation.
Versioning
A tool schema is a contract. Breaking renames or removals can affect clients and models. Introduce additive fields carefully, maintain a deprecation period for old tools, publish a changelog, and run contract tests.
Cost drivers
Compute, database/API usage, model sampling, egress, logs, and always-on connections. Cache only permission-safe reads and never mix data between tenants.
Adapted from 20_MCP_SERVER.md · “16. Deployment, Scaling, Versioning, and Operations”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.