MCP Dev Summit Mumbai 2026

Most MCP demos stop at "hello world over stdio." Shipping a production MCP server means answering harder questions: How do you authenticate callers? How do you meter usage? How do you safely hand an LLM a live Kubernetes cluster without giving it the keys to prod?

This talk walks through Starling, a production MCP server that exposes 17 Kubernetes tools — from list_pods to scan_cluster — to Claude, Cursor, and VS Code. It runs live on GKE at ops-mcp.warblecloud.com, charges credits per tool call, and handles ephemeral kubeconfigs without ever persisting them.

We'll cover concrete design decisions: dual-transport architecture (stdio for desktop agents, HTTP for remote), a Firestore-backed credit ledger with atomic per-tool debits, mode-gated write tools (scale_deployment only when --mode=readwrite), and the security model for handing an LLM temporary cluster access.

Attendees leave with a working mental model for turning an MCP prototype into a billable, multi-tenant service — plus the exact auth, transport, and RBAC patterns they can lift into their own servers.