Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming the standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data. With the recent technology preview of the MCP server for Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can give AI agents controlled access to their clusters. Deploying and managing MCP servers at scale introduces its own operational challenge: how do you treat MCP servers as first-class infrastructure?Today, we're making the MCP lifecycle operator available as a developer preview (v0.1.0). MCP lifecycle operator is a Kubernetes-native operator that provides a declarative API to deploy, manage, and safely roll out MCP servers on OpenShift and Kubernetes.Why an operator for MCP servers?Running an MCP server in a container is straightforward. Running it in production is not. You need health checks, role-based access control (RBAC), configuration management, service discovery, and lifecycle automation. The MCP lifecycle operator handles all of this through a single custom resource: MCPServer.When you create an MCPServer resource, the operator automatically:Creates a Deployment with security-hardened defaults (non-root, read-only filesystem, dropped capabilities)Exposes the server via a Service with a cluster-internal discovery URLValidates that referenced ConfigMaps and Secrets exist before rolling outInjects a default readiness probe so containers are not marked Ready until they are listening on the configured portDeploying the MCP serverLet's walk through a concrete example. Deploying the MCP server for OpenShift using the operator with proper RBAC for read-only cluster access.First, install the operator with this manifest file. After that, apply the following manifests for creating the MCP server and its configuration:---