k8s-ops-mcp

A read-only Kubernetes diagnostics MCP server plus a minimal host that wires a fully local LLM (Ollama) to it. Ask "is anything wrong in the llm namespace?" and watch the model call your tools, read your cluster, and explain what it found. No cloud, no API keys, nothing leaves the machine.

Part of a trilogy: Lodestar (a RAG assistant with tracing + evals) and llm-serving-platform (KServe + GitOps serving). Lodestar is the app, the platform serves the models, this project gives the AI hands: standardized tools to look at the infrastructure both of them run on.

Why

While building the serving platform, my debug loop was manual: run kubectl get events, copy the output, paste it into an AI, read the diagnosis. Useful but the human was the transport layer.

This project inverts that loop. MCP (Model Context Protocol) standardizes how AI clients discover and call tools the CSI/CNI of the AI world: define the contract once, and any client (Claude, an IDE, your own agent) can plug in. So I wrote the driver for my own daily workflow: the diagnostic commands I kept running by hand, exposed as tools an LLM can call itself.

Related MCP server: k8s-readonly-mcp

Architecture

The server is client-agnostic: the same server.py works under MCP Inspector, Claude Desktop, or the bundled host.py. The host exists because Ollama serves models but doesn't speak MCP so the ~100-line host does the client's job: list tools, translate them to the OpenAI tool schema, run the call-execute-continue loop.

Security model

The agent cannot write to the cluster not because it's told not to, but because it can't. The boundary is enforced below the LLM: the server only implements read operations, and it should run with a view-only ServiceAccount token rather than an admin kubeconfig. An LLM's judgement is a preference; RBAC is a guarantee. Design rule: never give a probabilistic component a capability you wouldn't give an intern on day one.

Run it yourself

Prereqs: Python 3.11+, a kubeconfig with (ideally read-only) cluster access, Ollama with a tool-capable model.

pip install "mcp[cli]" kubernetes openai
export KUBECONFIG_PATH=~/.kube/config        # or point server.py at your file

# 1. Test the server without any model — MCP Inspector:
mcp dev server.py --with kubernetes
#    → open the printed URL, call list_pods / get_events by hand

# 2. The full local agent loop:
ollama pull qwen2.5:7b
python host.py

Then:

you> is anything wrong in the llm namespace?
  [tool call] list_pods({'namespace': 'llm'})
  [tool call] get_events({'namespace': 'llm', 'warnings_only': True})

assistant> ...model's diagnosis of your actual cluster...

Repository layout

server.py    # FastMCP server: 3 read-only diagnostic tools
host.py      # minimal MCP host: Ollama ↔ MCP client loop

Output

Limitations & next steps

Deliberate debts tracked, not hidden:

• Small-model tool calling is imperfect. A 7B model occasionally answers from imagination instead of calling a tool; a nudge fixes it. Documenting the size/reliability trade-off is on the list.

• Three tools, one cluster's worth of scope. Next candidates: pod logs (tail-limited), node pressure, isvc-aware "why is it degraded" composite diagnosis.

• stdio transport only local by design for now. Next: HTTP transport so the server can run in-cluster and serve remote clients.

• RBAC hardening ship a Role/RoleBinding manifest for a view-only ServiceAccount so "read-only" is provable, not promised.

• Observability for the agent itself trace host.py's tool-call loop with Langfuse, closing the circle with the other two projects.