MCP Tools

How agents gain capabilities through MCP servers and the gateway.

An agent’s knowledge comes from its model and its RAG sources; its abilities - to read a cluster, query a database, search the web - come from tools. Kubemoot exposes tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so any MCP server becomes a capability a crew can use.

Servers, gateway, agents

Three resources form the tool chain, and agents never connect to a tool server directly:

Agent → MCPGateway → MCPServer
  • An MCPServer deploys one MCP tool server (a container image) and manages its lifecycle: the deployment, health probes, and - for the many servers that only speak stdio - an auto-injected mcp-bridge sidecar that bridges HTTP/SSE to the server’s stdin/stdout.
  • An MCPGateway is the hub agents talk to. It discovers MCPServers by label selector, performs the MCP handshake with each, aggregates all their tools, and routes an agent’s tool call to the right server.
  • An Agent reaches the gateway through its runtime and sees the union of tools the gateway exposes, narrowed by the agent’s own enabledTools / disabledTools.

This indirection means you can add or remove a tool server, or scale the gateway, without touching agent specs - the gateway rediscovers servers and re-aggregates tools.

Keep an agent’s tool set small

Tool-calling reliability falls off as the tool count grows. A capable model handles roughly 10-15 tools well; beyond that, selection degrades. So tools are scoped per agent rather than handed wholesale to every agent: a Tooler gets the handful that fit its domain, set with spec.enabledTools. When a useful server carries far more tools than one agent should hold, split it across more than one Tooler.

Where tools come from

You declare MCPServers directly. When no existing agent can answer a question, the coordinator signals a capability gap, and an agent running in onboarding mode can propose an MCP server and, on user consent, reply with a proposed MCPServer manifest. Applying it and wiring the new server to a Tooler agent are manual steps today. See Onboard MCP Tools for the workflow and the MCPServer and MCPGateway references for the specs. Discovering servers from public and private registries is on the Roadmap.