Case Study: NetApp scales AI agents and Kubernetes troubleshooting with TrueFoundry’s MCP Gateway

NetApp scales AI agents across 8 Kubernetes clusters with TrueFoundry

NetApp, a data management and cloud company, faced the challenge of scaling AI agents to troubleshoot complex issues across its large Kubernetes environment. Their Developer Platform Engineering team, led by Rob Rubin, sought a vendor-agnostic solution to avoid lock-in and needed a secure way to govern model access and host tooling servers. They partnered with vendor TrueFoundry to implement its MCP Gateway and harness technology.

The solution implemented by TrueFoundry provided governed model access and a secure platform for MCP servers, enabling NetApp's AI agents to securely execute commands as the authenticated user. This allowed agents to autonomously conduct deep, 30+ iteration investigations across eight clusters. The partnership led to the development of key capabilities like sandboxed execution and context engineering to overcome technical walls. The results were significant, scaling from one agent to a fleet used by thousands of employees, with 150 tools now accessible through a single governed endpoint, giving NetApp precise control over AI spend and attribution.

NetApp