CTERA Portal MCP Server Multi-Cloud Unified Management

Overview

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) server from CTERA is a lightweight control plane for managing large-scale, multi-tenant and multi-cloud file environments. It centralizes metadata and policy control so organizations can present a unified global namespace across geographically distributed storage backends and cloud providers. For developers, the MCP server acts as the API-driven orchestration layer that maps tenants and namespaces to physical storage and enforces global policies, auditability, and visibility.

This server is useful when you need to manage petabytes of distributed content while maintaining consistent identity, access controls and namespace semantics across clouds, regions or edge locations. Instead of building custom glue between clouds and local environments, the MCP server provides a single control interface to register clouds, create tenants, define namespaces and apply cross-cutting policies programmatically.

Features

• Multi-tenant control plane for isolated customer environments
• Multi-cloud mapping to connect S3-compatible, object stores and cloud buckets into a single namespace
• Global namespace creation and mount-point management across distributed stores
• Centralized policy and access control enforcement for tenants and namespaces
• RESTful API for automation and integration with orchestration systems
• Extensible configuration and pluggable backends to adopt custom storage drivers
• Audit and health endpoints for operational observability
• Example clients and scripts to bootstrap and test deployments

Installation / Configuration

Minimum steps to get a development instance running. Adjust environment values and secrets for production.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ctera/mcp-ctera-core.git
cd mcp-ctera-core

Run with Docker (example):

# docker-compose.yml
version: "3.7"
services:
  mcp:
    image: ctera/mcp-server:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - MCP_BIND=0.0.0.0:8080
      - MCP_ADMIN_TOKEN=replace-with-secure-token
    volumes:
      - ./config:/app/config

Start:

docker-compose up -d

Alternatively, build from source (example):

# assuming a standard build system is provided
make build
./bin/mcp-server --config ./config/mcp.yaml

Basic configuration (config/mcp.yaml):

server:
  bind: "0.0.0.0:8080"
  tls:
    enabled: true
    cert_file: /path/to/tls.crt
    key_file: /path/to/tls.key

auth:
  admin_token: "replace-with-secure-token"

storage_backends:
  - id: aws-logs
    type: s3
    region: us-east-1
    credentials:
      access_key: "AKIA..."
      secret_key: "..."

Security notes:

• Always use TLS in production.
• Store tokens/keys in a secrets manager rather than plain config files.
• Restrict administrative access to management interfaces.

Available Resources

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/ctera/mcp-ctera-core
• REST API: HTTP endpoints for health, tenants, namespaces and policies (see repository API docs)
• Example scripts: bootstrap, smoke tests and sample clients in the repo
• Configuration templates: YAML examples for production and development
• Observability: /health and metrics endpoints for integration with monitoring stacks

Component overview:

Use Cases

1. Global namespace for hybrid cloud backups

   • Register several S3 buckets (AWS/GCP/MinIO) as backends.
   • Create a tenant for a customer and map a global namespace that aggregates bucket paths into a single mount point.
   • Manage retention and access control centrally for the tenant.

2. Multi-tenant SaaS offering

   • Use the MCP server to isolate tenant metadata and policies while the backend storage is shared or in multiple regions.
   • Automate tenant provisioning through API calls in a CI/CD pipeline.

3. Data migration and replication

   • Orchestrate migration by mapping source and target storage to temporary namespaces.
   • Use the API to create, monitor and validate migrations, while keeping an audit trail of operations.

4. Centralized policy enforcement

   • Apply encryption, retention and access policies centrally and have them enforced across diverse storage backends without changing client behavior.

Quick API examples

Health check:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer replace-with-token" http://localhost:8080/api/v1/health

Create a tenant (example payloads will vary by implementation):

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/tenants \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer replace-with-token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"id":"tenant-123","name":"ACME Corp"}'

Map a namespace to a backend:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/namespaces \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer replace-with-token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"tenant_id":"tenant-123","namespace":"/acme/global","backend":"aws-logs","path":"acme-bucket/"}'

Refer to the repository for complete API reference, schema examples and client libraries.