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Demo: MCP Servers — Agentic Automation with Governance

Start here. A customer watches an AI assistant query a live OpenShift cluster and launch an Ansible job template — reading everything, changing nothing except through the governed automation path — in about twenty minutes.
Length 20 minutes (15 + 5 for questions)
Audience Platform engineers and automation leads evaluating how AI fits into operations
Reader The Ansible pre-sales engineer presenting it
Needs a live environment? Yes — the compelling beats are live queries against a real cluster
Status Draft — OpenShift MCP content complete, AAP MCP content is placeholder

The five documents (plus three)

File Read it when
run-sheet.md While presenting. Minute markers, what is on screen, exact commands, recovery moves
talk-track.md While rehearsing. The narrative and the actual words, beat by beat
architecture.md When asked "how does that work". The seven servers, the credential flow, the access posture
objections.md Before you go in. What this audience asks — especially the security questions
server-inventory.md When asked "what can it do". Full tool listings, status tables, verification commands
building-a-server.md When asked "what about my platform". When no MCP server exists: whether to build one, what language, transport, packaging, hosting
servicenow.md When asked about ITSM. Why the native console is the one to wait for, and why the Ansible write path needs no MCP server

Present from the run sheet. Rehearse from the talk track. The other five are reference.

Why the extra files. The detailed status tables, per-server tool listings, and verification commands that run-sheet.md and architecture.md cite would overwhelm either one — the same reason Private Automation Hub earned clickops.md. The last two answer the question this demo reliably provokes — "what about the platform I care about, which has no MCP server?" — which is a different question from how the six servers here work.

The 60-second version

  1. Show the six MCP servers and their access posture — three OpenShift (local; sandbox and edge read-write, demo read-only), two AAP (in-cluster, the same sandbox/demo split), one Grafana Cloud (local, read-only Viewer). The environment is in the server's name, and the audience sees the posture before a single query runs.
  2. Issue a read-only query against the cluster — ask what VMs are running, what pods are in a namespace, what a guest's OS version is. The assistant gets real data, not a summary or a slide.
  3. Launch a job template through AAP — the governed write path. The assistant requests a change, AAP enforces its own RBAC and survey, the audit trail is in the controller.

What the demo is actually about is not that AI can talk to infrastructure. It is that the boundary between what the AI can read and what it can change is visible, enforced, and auditable — and that the change path is the same governed Ansible workflow the customer already trusts.

Why it mostly works without a cluster

The status tables in server-inventory.md are committed and render on GitHub. The architecture diagram is Mermaid. The tool listings were measured on live servers and documented with their provenance.

But the demo's strongest beats need a warm environment. A live query returning real cluster state is the cold open, and no screenshot replaces it. If you are presenting without a cluster, lead with the architecture and the status tables, and be upfront that these are documented measurements rather than a live run.

If you want to run it live

/sales-demos-mcp          # sets up all six servers — kubeconfigs + AAP tokens + Grafana

Then verify the servers answer — the skill does this automatically, but if you want to confirm independently:

claude mcp list           # all six servers should appear

New to this repo? Run /sales-demos-first-time first.

Red Hat resources

Resource What it covers
Model Context Protocol specification The protocol itself — what MCP is and why it exists
kubernetes-mcp-server The upstream project powering the OpenShift MCP servers (Apache-2.0)
Deploying the Ansible MCP Server Official Red Hat guide for the AAP MCP server
Deploy MCP servers on OpenShift using ToolHive Red Hat Developer article on containerised MCP hosting
ansible.mcp_builder Red Hat CoP collection for building MCP servers into container images