The MCP Production Readiness Checklist: What We Learned Shipping Real Servers

The useful part

Rather than repeat either in detail, this is the condensed checklist — the thing you'd actually tape to the wall before a release. Why a checklist instead of another tutorial Tutorials show you one path through one server. A checklist works differently: it's a list of things that will bite you regardless of which framework, transport, or model you're using, because they're structural, not implementation details.

How it works

• It's that most public examples stop exactly where production work begins.
• If you can check every box below, you're in materially better shape than 90% of the MCP servers currently sitting in public repos.
• Long-lived sessions are the single most common way an MCP server turns into a standing liability.
• You have a clear answer for "what happens when auth expires mid-task." Does the agent get a clean, actionable error, or does it silently retry into a wall?

Details worth keeping

If you've built more than one MCP server, you've probably noticed a pattern: the first version takes an afternoon, and the second version — the one that actually has to survive real traffic, real auth flows, and real agent behavior — takes weeks.