Overview

The IONOS CLOUD MCP Server is a local binary that implements the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It connects your AI assistant or autonomous AI agent to your IONOS CLOUD account, letting you inspect your resources through natural language prompts or programmatic agentic loops.

How it works

The MCP server runs as a local process on your machine. Your AI client communicates with it over stdio using the MCP JSON-RPC protocol. The server translates your AI assistant's tool calls into IONOS CLOUD API requests and returns the results as structured text.

Data sovereignty

The MCP server runs entirely on your workstation and calls the IONOS CLOUD API directly over HTTPS. No third-party AI provider sits in the data path between the binary and IONOS CLOUD.

The AI client is separate. It sends your prompts and the JSON returned by MCP tools to its own model backend for inference. For Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code (GitHub Copilot), that backend is operated by a US-headquartered vendor and may be subject to non-EU jurisdiction (for example, the US CLOUD Act) regardless of the inference region. Treat tool outputs (resource names, IDs, IP addresses, billing figures) as data that leaves the IONOS perimeter once the AI assistant reads them.

If you need a path where neither the API calls nor the inference reach a non-EU provider, pair the MCP server with the IONOS CLOUD AI Model Hub, which serves open-weight LLMs from IONOS's German data centers. For more information, see Fully Sovereign AI Workflow.

Supported products

Product	Tools	What you can do
Compute Engine	50	List and inspect data centers, servers, volumes, NICs, LANs, load balancers, NAT gateways, security groups, IP blocks, and more
IONOS CLOUD Object Storage	23	List buckets and objects, inspect bucket configuration (CORS, encryption, lifecycle, replication), and check access keys
Cloud DNS	14	List and inspect zones, records, reverse records, secondary zones, and DNSSEC keys
Billing	15	View invoices, usage, traffic, the product pricing catalog, and the FOCUS v1.3 mapping
Certificate Manager	6	List and inspect certificates, auto-certificates, and providers
Activity Log	2	Query the full audit trail: who did what, when, on which resource

Read-only scope (initial release)

This release is read-only by design. All 100+ tools across 6 products are inspection and query operations; the server cannot create, update, or delete any IONOS CLOUD resources. This is a deliberate security posture: you can safely connect the MCP server to a production account and share project configurations with teammates without risk of accidental modifications.

The server runs locally on your machine. It does not require a cloud-hosted component.

MCP resources

In addition to tools, the MCP specification defines resources: structured data that the server exposes for AI clients to read as context. The MCP server exposes one resource:

Resource URI	Content
ionos://billing/focus-v1.3	Full FOCUS v1.3 column mapping for all billing tools; use this to build standards-compliant cost pipelines. For more information, see FinOps and FOCUS Billing.

Ask your AI assistant to read a resource by name: "Read the resource ionos://billing/focus-v1.3."

IONOS CLOUD Documentation MCP

The IONOS CLOUD documentation site at docs.ionos.com exposes a built-in MCP server at:

https://docs.ionos.com/cloud/~gitbook/mcp

This is a separate, complementary MCP server powered by GitBook that exposes documentation search and retrieval tools; your AI assistant can query guides, how-tos, reference pages, and release notes by topic. No authentication required. The two servers are independent: use either one alone or both together.

Configure both servers together to combine live infrastructure data with documentation knowledge:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ionoscloud-docs": {
      "url": "https://docs.ionos.com/cloud/~gitbook/mcp"
    },
    "ionoscloud": {
      "command": "/usr/local/bin/ionoscloud-mcp",
      "env": {
        "IONOS_TOKEN": "your-api-token"
      }
    }
  }
}

Server	What it answers
ionoscloud-docs	"How does FOCUS billing work?" "What are the firewall rule limits?" "What changed in the June 2026 release?"
ionoscloud	"List my data centers" "What is my invoice total?" "Which certificates expire this month?"

Example: one prompt, two servers:

List my certificates that expire within 60 days. Then look up the IONOS CLOUD Certificate Manager documentation and tell me the recommended renewal process.

The AI assistant calls list_cert_certificates on the infrastructure server for live data, and searches the documentation server for the renewal guide, all in a single conversation.

For more information, see Composing Multiple MCP Servers.

Next steps

• Quick Start: install the binary and connect your first client in under five minutes
• Connect to an AI Client: per-client setup guides
• Tool Reference: full list of all tools