ContextForge MCP Gateway - Secure Self-Hosted MCP Proxy

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Overview

ContextForge MCP Gateway is IBM's open source gateway, registry and proxy for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard that lets AI assistants and agents call external tools. It sits in front of many separate MCP servers and presents them as one authenticated endpoint, with a registry of servers and their tools, virtual servers composed from a chosen set of tools, and an admin web interface. Rather than wiring each assistant to each server by hand, your agents connect once and reach your whole MCP tool estate through a single controlled front door. This AMI delivers the gateway fully installed and secured, exposed over TLS through a browser-based admin UI you run and control in your own AWS account.

## Why This Image vs a Manual Install

This image eliminates the Python virtual environment build, dependency pinning, systemd unit authoring, TLS reverse-proxy configuration, and credential hardening that a manual install requires. Upstream ships known default credentials and a known default signing secret, so a hand-rolled deployment is exposed until every secret is rotated by hand. This image generates a unique administrator password, JWT signing secret and encryption secret on each instance's first boot, binds the gateway and datastore to loopback, and fronts the UI with an nginx TLS reverse proxy. Because a gateway with nothing behind it cannot be demonstrated, the image also bundles one real reference MCP server, the official time server, federated automatically at first boot, so a working proxied tool call is available the moment the instance is up.

## Application Stack

ContextForge MCP Gateway is installed from the official upstream release (pip mcp-contextforge-gateway, pinned) into a Python virtual environment at /opt/mcpgateway, running as an unprivileged system user under a hardened systemd unit and bound to loopback 127.0.0.1:4444. An nginx reverse proxy terminates TLS on port 443 with a per-instance self-signed certificate and forwards to the gateway; port 80 redirects to 443. The registry, tools, virtual servers, users and tokens are held in a local SQLite datastore, so there is no external database to run. systemd starts the gateway, the bundled server and nginx on boot and restarts them on failure.

## Security Hardening

• No default or shared credentials: the upstream default admin and signing secret never survive into a running instance; a random administrator password, JWT signing secret and encryption secret are generated on each instance's first boot and written only to a root-only file
• Authentication required: the admin UI and gateway API refuse unauthenticated requests and any bearer token signed with a different secret
• Network isolation: the gateway and bundled MCP server bind exclusively to loopback; only the nginx TLS reverse proxy is exposed
• Per-instance TLS: each instance mints its own certificate on first boot, so no shared private key is baked into the image
• Least privilege: the gateway runs as an unprivileged system user, and server-side request forgery protection stays enabled

Buyers requiring formal compliance documentation should contact cloudimg to discuss specific requirements.

## Concrete Use Cases

• One front door for an agent's tools: A team building AI assistants points every assistant at a single authenticated gateway instead of wiring each one to each MCP server, and controls which tools are exposed from one admin console
• Governed MCP tool estate: An organisation that wants its Model Context Protocol servers and the auth for them kept entirely inside its own AWS account, behind one controlled endpoint with a registry and per-instance credentials, rather than exposing each server directly
• Virtual servers for a use case: A platform team composes a virtual MCP server from a curated set of tools drawn across several backend servers, and hands that single endpoint to a downstream agent

## AWS Integration

Deploy on any EC2 instance type. Front the gateway with your own DNS name and certificate by replacing the per-instance self-signed one. Restrict the security group so port 443 is reachable only from the agents and clients that need it, since the gateway aggregates credentials for every server it federates. Back up the SQLite datastore with EBS snapshots of the OS volume.

## Getting Started

Read your credential from the root-only file, open the admin UI over HTTPS, sign in as the administrator, and explore the bundled server and its federated tools. Register your own MCP servers, compose virtual servers, and mint API tokens for your agents.

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with deployment, TLS termination with your own domain and certificate, federating your own MCP servers, and backup planning for your gateway datastore.