Best practices for MCP deployments

Apply least-privilege access - Every component — whether a function, container, or instance — should have only the permissions it needs for its specific task. Avoid wildcard resource permissions. Use short-lived credentials wherever possible and never store long-lived credentials on compute resources.

Protect data at rest and in transit -Encrypt all stored data using customer-managed or platform-managed keys depending on your compliance requirements. Enforce TLS 1.2 or higher for all network communication. Secrets should be stored in a managed secrets service with automatic rotation — never hardcoded or stored in environment variables unencrypted.

Keep compute private - Place all MCP servers behind a load balancer in private subnets. Only the load balancer or API entry point should be internet-facing. Use private endpoints for internal service-to-service traffic to avoid traversing the public internet.

Design for failure - Deploy across at least two availability zones. Implement circuit breakers and explicit timeouts on all downstream calls — never rely on platform defaults. Applications should degrade gracefully when a dependency is unavailable rather than failing entirely.

Enable threat detection from day one - Turn on audit logging for all API activities across your accounts. Use automated threat detection to analyze logs for anomalous behavior. Centralize security findings into a single dashboard and define incident response runbooks before an incident occurs.

Right-size before you scale - Start with a conservative allocation and tune based on observed metrics. Over-provisioned resources waste money and energy. Use automated recommendations after a period of baseline operation rather than guessing upfront.

Define infrastructure as code - Never create or modify production resources manually. All compute, networking, IAM, and monitoring resources should be version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed through automated pipelines. This approach is designed to provide repeatability, auditability, and safe rollbacks.

Design long-running operations asynchronously - MCP tools that take more than a few seconds to complete should be decoupled from the synchronous request path. Accept the request, queue the work, return a job ID, and provide a polling or callback mechanism. This avoids gateway timeouts and improves user experience.

Tag every resource - Apply consistent tags — at minimum environment, application, team, and cost centre — to all resources. Enforce tagging policy through automated rules. Without tagging, cost attribution and compliance reporting become impractical at scale.

Prefer managed services over self-managed infrastructure - Managed and serverless compute eliminates idle resource consumption and reduce operational burden. When evaluating compute options, only choose self-managed infrastructure when there is a specific capability requirement that managed services cannot satisfy.