MCP Best Practices Guide¶
This guide provides high‑level, vendor‑neutral guidance for building, deploying, and operating MCP servers in production. It emphasizes principles and patterns over framework specifics, and favors simple, observable, secure designs that scale.
What is MCP?¶
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications—it provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.
What This Guide Covers¶
The guide is organized into practical sections that mirror the MCP server lifecycle.
| Section | Focus | Key Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 🧭 Overview | What MCP is and where it fits | Core building blocks; when to use MCP; success factors |
| ⭐ Best Practices | Principles that stand the test of production | Single responsibility; contracts‑first; additive change; stateless defaults |
| 💻 Develop | Building servers with discipline | Outcomes and contracts; observability from day one; least‑privilege integrations |
| 🧪 Test | Validating behavior and quality | Unit/integration/E2E; evals and baselines; coverage and CI gates |
| 📦 Package | Reliable distribution and supply chain integrity | Containers; SBOMs and signing; provenance; trusted catalogs |
| 🚀 Deploy | Topology and platform guidance | Gateway front‑door; environment separation; sandboxing; rollout strategies |
| ⚙️ Operate | Lifecycle and day‑2 excellence | SLOs; monitoring and incident flow; catalog and approvals; multi‑tenancy |
| 🛡️ Secure | Defense‑in‑depth for MCP | Identity and access; policy‑as‑code; runtime controls; continuous assurance |
| 🔌 Use | How clients/hosts consume MCP | Host choices; gateway mediation; good‑citizen patterns |
Who This Guide Is For¶
- Developers building MCP servers and integrations
- DevOps Engineers deploying and operating MCP infrastructure
- Engineering Teams adopting MCP in production environments
- Technical Leaders evaluating MCP for their organizations
Getting Started¶
If you're new to MCP, start with:
- Overview — fundamentals and context
- Best Practices — essential standards
- Develop — building your first server
Contributing¶
This guide is community‑driven. We welcome contributions, corrections, and improvements. The content reflects real‑world experience and evolving best practices from the MCP community.
Learn the Protocol¶
For protocol details (transports, messages, discovery), refer to the official specification at https://spec.modelcontextprotocol.io. This guide assumes familiarity with the spec and focuses on how to apply it effectively in production.
Ready to build production-grade MCP servers? Let's get started! 🚀