MCP in Practice — Part 6: Your MCP Server Worked Locally. What Changes in Production?

Part 6 of the MCP in Practice Series · Back: Part 5 — Build Your First MCP Server (and Client) In Part 5, you built an order assistant that ran on your laptop. Claude Desktop launched it as a subprocess, communicated over stdio, and everything worked. The server could look up orders, check statuses, and cancel items. It was a working MCP server. Then someone on your team asked: can I use it too? That question changes everything. Not because the protocol changes — JSON-RPC messages stay identical — but because the deployment changes. This article follows one server, the TechNova order assistant, as it grows from a local prototype to a production system. At each stage, something breaks, something gets added, and ownership shifts. By the end, you will have the complete production picture of MCP before we go deeper on transport or auth in follow-ups. You do not need to implement every production layer yourself. But you do need to understand where each one appears. If you already run MCP se