7 ms·

MCP Gateway and Registry

73 points by nikhilk218 1y ago

blitzar 1y ago
IBM pivoting to Ai, must be getting close to the top now.
- fhd2 1y ago
  Not sure I'd call that a pivot, they've been at it for many years and even at the forefront every now and then, e.g. IBM Watson. At least it seems like that from my non-specialist, outside perspective.
- N_Lens 1y ago
  Actually already peaked.
thecopy 1y ago
Many Gateways popping up now, im also doing my own gateway (https://mcp-boss.com/ https://mcp-boss.com/) but im starting to worry its hard to compete with Docker, Microsoft, now IBM...
- ares623 1y ago
  You should pivot to building an MCP for all the MCP gateways
- sublimefire 1y ago
  mcp is not the future IMO, agent2agent is, e.g. a2aproject/A2A The problem with MCP is that it cannot reliably scale, so some abstraction is helpful, i.e. separate “agent” with its own instructions and a predefined set of tools.
jumploops 1y ago
Does anyone use MCP within their product, or is the MCP ecosystem entirely focused on enabling new workflows within an existing chat/agent framework (a la Cursor or Claude code)? Assuming the latter, are there any viable non-developer MCP clients?
- Xantier 1y ago
  I've done a bit of research around trying to find the best, simple clients that don't need an engineering degree to set up but haven't really stumbled upon a good one yet. Claude desktop app advertises that they support all features (they don't), all the others with closer to full spec compliance are related to software development (VS Code and Continue etc.).
- manojlds 1y ago
  Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are the main non developer MCP clients. ChatGPT has limited MCP support as of now (read only use cases with deep research) but the expectation is that full MCP support might be dropping soon.
  - pmig 1y ago
    ChatGPT launching MCP support would dramatically improve adoption, but MCP server installation must become way easier to find non coding use case adoption.
- dalemhurley 1y ago
  MCP is one of the most powerful ways for app-to-app communication. Instead of having to hardcode against an API, the LLM can just request the latest API spec and request what it needs. As a developer you could completely skip the LLM. MCP, is just a really good M2M documentation.
- pylotlight 1y ago
  I was really hoping this would take off. https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol
  - frumplestlatz 1y ago
    I don’t really get it — designing a truly universal description language for all possible service endpoint types and protocols is a hard (arguably impossible) problem. Writing a client capable of parsing and using that description isn’t much easier. Unsurprisingly, it appears there’s no real spec: https://www.utcp.io/about/RFC https://www.utcp.io/about/RFC
Xantier 1y ago
I find the context forge quite nice from IBM. I used a few approaches they've implemented within my Ctxpack context management solution as well. I think the agentic use cases aside, the client side of MCPs are still lacking quite a bit and would need to mature to be able to catch up to the spec. I feel a lot of use cases exist outside of fully automated agentic approaches, since we can't really rely on LLMs yet to produce at a human level. The underserved cases rely a lot on prompt and resource management at the moment. Being able to iterate and share those across teams to provide easy starting points to delegate tasks is something I feel would be workable for the current iteration of AI assisted work, outside of pure software engineering. Hopefully other clients join VS Code Copilot to allow more varied approaches than just simple tool calls here. I think Copilot's approach on prompt and resource management isn't quite the best approach either though. It is still early days for MCPs in general so i think we'll see a lot of experiments in this space.
joshwarwick15 1y ago
For Officially hosted (provider hosts their own MCP) there’s an high quality list here: https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tuananh 1y ago
I built hyper-mcp[1] as side project with each MCP as a WASM plugin. The idea is each plugin runs in their own wasm vm with limited network/file system access. Plugins are written in any language, as long as they can compile to WASM and publish to OCI registry (signed & verified with sigstore) Recently, Microsoft released their own version of hyper-mcp named Wassete[2] Ideally, I want to make it like a gateway with more security & governance features in this layer. [1]: https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp [2]: https://github.com/microsoft/wassette https://github.com/microsoft/wassette
- fullstackwife 1y ago
  For many years we were fine with running DLLs, Java .class deps, npm modules, brew packages etc. why do you think we need so much isolation for left-pad class mcp tools?
- pmig 1y ago
  Interesting we also just released our mcp gateway project under the name Hypr MCP[1]. [1]: https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway
  - tuananh 1y ago
    Cool. I want to add dynamic client registration but haven't got around to do it yet.
    - pmig 1y ago
      Feel free to just include our gateway in your docker compose file.
pmig 1y ago
These kind of gateways showcase that larger organizations will equip their employees with tools the same way employees are currently granted access to specific SaaS applications. One of the bigger challenges we are currently observing is missing authorization for MCP servers. We actually also just released a mcp-gateway[1] initially focusing on adding OAuth authorization to streamable HTTP MCP servers. [1]: https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway
pylotlight 1y ago
If only IBM supported something more structured and sensible than the mess that is MCP: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol
- raverbashing 1y ago
  These words and that brand name don't go together here
BoredPositron 1y ago
Whats hilarious about this whole AI hype is that probably a million people are building the exact same software at the moment.
- turblety 1y ago
  Isn't that beautiful. True competition. Shouldn't that be how the world works, businesses too? Lots of people, trying their best to build things, and some will share ideas, some with have their own unique points. Or do we just want CorporateSoftTM to build and own everything in just one big single commercial platform? I would love it if loads more businesses could start up.
  - thrance 1y ago
    More like a severe lack of communication and visiblity leading to vastly inefficient work duplication.
    - turblety 1y ago
      I don't think an efficient marketplace is really a world anyone wants to live in. No one would have a job, purpose, creativity, anything really. What's the purpose if everything is efficent.
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    No, dozens of companies burning money to reinvent the same thing, and the best product rarely wins anyway. You get locked into inferior systems just because they had better timing or marketing. The romantic startup vision sounds nice, but most of those businesses would just fail after wasting capital and talent that could've been used better elsewhere. It's messy and inefficient. >> Or do we just want CorporateSoftTM to build and own everything in just one big single commercial platform? It's gonna get acquired anyways... what do you think the endgame of 99% of startups is? Building a company?
    - theshrike79 1y ago
Jnr 1y ago
Looks similar to MetaMCP https://github.com/metatool-ai/metamcp https://github.com/metatool-ai/metamcp Not sure which of these tools is currently the best but they are clearly needed. I am testing MetaMCP to expose internal MCP servers to the cloud version of Claude, enabling me to use Home Assistant and some other internal services in verbal conversations with Claude app on the phone. I think 3rd party MCP server use is available in other AI assistants as well but Claude is the only one who allows using them in Europe. I can only wish that this would become a standard approach with any AI assistants, including the built in phone assistants like Siri, but Apple is so so far behind and always trying to squeeze every bit of money wherever they can, I doubt they will ever do that. This approach enables better integrations with local services specific to different regions, and I would somewhat compare this to RSS feeds which were popular 15 years ago. Would be nice if most e-commerce sites would provide their own MCP servers for managing carts, placing and tracking orders, etc. I don't want to see a world where single monopoly grabs this market and makes things shit again (like it happened with social media), especially for those who live outside of USA.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Agntcy is a little more elaborate, but also notable as a massive AI tool that includes tool management. Donated to Linux Foundation from Cisco & many others. https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/agntcy-donated-to-linux-foundation https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/agntcy-donated-to-linux-foun... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731621
theshrike79 1y ago
So from what I gather this would be useful at a company level. Everyone installs this gateway as their only "MCP", then at a central location we can add different MCP tools and everyone automatically gains access to them.
qwertox 1y ago
> Caution: The current release (0.6.0) is considered alpha / early beta. It is not production-ready and should only be used for local development, testing, or experimentation. Features, APIs, and behaviors are subject to change without notice. Do not deploy in production environments without thorough security review, validation and additional security mechanisms. Many of the features required for secure, large-scale, or multi-tenant production deployments are still on the project roadmap - which is itself evolving. IBM posting as if it were a solo open-source developer.
Haley_wu 1y ago
[dead]
willahmad 1y ago
I have built similar gateway but as a desktop application which runs locally and gives you a lot of control over enabled MCP tools and allows you to have a separate profiles for different combinations of MCP servers and credentials (e.g. profile with production API keys, sandbox keys and etc,.). give it a try here: https://getaiko.app/downloads https://getaiko.app/downloads
GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
Ah nice an AI generated MCP gateway. I can't wait to see how many different agent/tool protocols we'll run through this year, and how many gateways. I just spin up oauth2proxy to handle authentication with istio gateway. Maybe I should be deploying piles of unknown code instead?
- pmig 1y ago
  oauth2proxy actually doesn't work for MCP servers due to missing dynamic client registration..
  - GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
    You're right, we're not strictly implementing things according to the spec/oauth 2.1
smcleod 1y ago
The best MCP Gateway I've found by far is Unla MCP Gateway - https://github.com/AmoyLab/Unla https://github.com/AmoyLab/Unla
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kenm47 1y ago
i built maybe don't ai's mcp gateway——but to me the interesting technology isn't about the registry or flattening of downstream MCP servers (honestly that was a reasonably easy problem to solve) it's about the behavior of the AI agents that are connecting to these servers and making very bad decisions. And yes to teh comments about people making a million of these... so very very many of them.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
This is awesome, I was just looking at scaffolding for doing something like this today. This needs to be able to support plugins to override behavior. I don't want my models having a giant tool registry, I want them to ask an oracle for the best 3 options, and I'd like to be able to inject specific behavior on a per MCP basis.
- thecopy 1y ago
  Hey, im building https://mcp-boss.com https://mcp-boss.com (MCP Gateway SaaS) and im looking for ways to improve the offering, and im interested in what you mean with "inject specific behavior on a per MCP basis"?
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Just off the cuff I'm not sure a MCP manager has got quite the scope for a SAAS offering, at least not if you're just managing config. There might be a play at the enterprise level if you can integrate deeply with domain policy. Mostly I find working with MCPs pretty easy, but there is some minor benefit to hosting mcp servers that are more involved to set up. The thing that I would pay a small amount for (which is why I'm building it myself) is a MCP oracle that configures the MCP server set for an agent based on the task it's working on.
    - thecopy 1y ago
      Totally, its also the realisation have gotten too. Im working now to expand the offering to be able to run agents/sub-agents with Agent2Agent which all get access to the MCP:s. Although i believe too for development teams it might be valuable, all devs get automatically access to all services with 1-click install etc etc. But question is how unique/powerful is it.

73 points by nikhilk218 1y ago

blitzar 1y ago

IBM pivoting to Ai, must be getting close to the top now.

fhd2 1y ago
Not sure I'd call that a pivot, they've been at it for many years and even at the forefront every now and then, e.g. IBM Watson. At least it seems like that from my non-specialist, outside perspective.
N_Lens 1y ago
Actually already peaked.

thecopy 1y ago

Many Gateways popping up now, im also doing my own gateway (https://mcp-boss.com/ https://mcp-boss.com/) but im starting to worry its hard to compete with Docker, Microsoft, now IBM...

ares623 1y ago
You should pivot to building an MCP for all the MCP gateways
sublimefire 1y ago
mcp is not the future IMO, agent2agent is, e.g. a2aproject/A2A The problem with MCP is that it cannot reliably scale, so some abstraction is helpful, i.e. separate “agent” with its own instructions and a predefined set of tools.

jumploops 1y ago

Does anyone use MCP within their product, or is the MCP ecosystem entirely focused on enabling new workflows within an existing chat/agent framework (a la Cursor or Claude code)? Assuming the latter, are there any viable non-developer MCP clients?

Xantier 1y ago
I've done a bit of research around trying to find the best, simple clients that don't need an engineering degree to set up but haven't really stumbled upon a good one yet. Claude desktop app advertises that they support all features (they don't), all the others with closer to full spec compliance are related to software development (VS Code and Continue etc.).
manojlds 1y ago
Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are the main non developer MCP clients. ChatGPT has limited MCP support as of now (read only use cases with deep research) but the expectation is that full MCP support might be dropping soon.
- pmig 1y ago
  ChatGPT launching MCP support would dramatically improve adoption, but MCP server installation must become way easier to find non coding use case adoption.
dalemhurley 1y ago
MCP is one of the most powerful ways for app-to-app communication. Instead of having to hardcode against an API, the LLM can just request the latest API spec and request what it needs. As a developer you could completely skip the LLM. MCP, is just a really good M2M documentation.
pylotlight 1y ago
I was really hoping this would take off. https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol
- frumplestlatz 1y ago
  I don’t really get it — designing a truly universal description language for all possible service endpoint types and protocols is a hard (arguably impossible) problem. Writing a client capable of parsing and using that description isn’t much easier. Unsurprisingly, it appears there’s no real spec: https://www.utcp.io/about/RFC https://www.utcp.io/about/RFC

Xantier 1y ago

I find the context forge quite nice from IBM. I used a few approaches they've implemented within my Ctxpack context management solution as well. I think the agentic use cases aside, the client side of MCPs are still lacking quite a bit and would need to mature to be able to catch up to the spec. I feel a lot of use cases exist outside of fully automated agentic approaches, since we can't really rely on LLMs yet to produce at a human level. The underserved cases rely a lot on prompt and resource management at the moment. Being able to iterate and share those across teams to provide easy starting points to delegate tasks is something I feel would be workable for the current iteration of AI assisted work, outside of pure software engineering. Hopefully other clients join VS Code Copilot to allow more varied approaches than just simple tool calls here. I think Copilot's approach on prompt and resource management isn't quite the best approach either though. It is still early days for MCPs in general so i think we'll see a lot of experiments in this space.

joshwarwick15 1y ago

For Officially hosted (provider hosts their own MCP) there’s an high quality list here: https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tuananh 1y ago

I built hyper-mcp[1] as side project with each MCP as a WASM plugin. The idea is each plugin runs in their own wasm vm with limited network/file system access. Plugins are written in any language, as long as they can compile to WASM and publish to OCI registry (signed & verified with sigstore) Recently, Microsoft released their own version of hyper-mcp named Wassete[2] Ideally, I want to make it like a gateway with more security & governance features in this layer. [1]: https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp [2]: https://github.com/microsoft/wassette https://github.com/microsoft/wassette

fullstackwife 1y ago
For many years we were fine with running DLLs, Java .class deps, npm modules, brew packages etc. why do you think we need so much isolation for left-pad class mcp tools?
pmig 1y ago
Interesting we also just released our mcp gateway project under the name Hypr MCP[1]. [1]: https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway
- tuananh 1y ago
  Cool. I want to add dynamic client registration but haven't got around to do it yet.
  - pmig 1y ago
    Feel free to just include our gateway in your docker compose file.

pmig 1y ago

These kind of gateways showcase that larger organizations will equip their employees with tools the same way employees are currently granted access to specific SaaS applications. One of the bigger challenges we are currently observing is missing authorization for MCP servers. We actually also just released a mcp-gateway[1] initially focusing on adding OAuth authorization to streamable HTTP MCP servers. [1]: https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway https://github.com/hyprmcp/mcp-gateway

pylotlight 1y ago

If only IBM supported something more structured and sensible than the mess that is MCP: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol

raverbashing 1y ago
These words and that brand name don't go together here

BoredPositron 1y ago

Whats hilarious about this whole AI hype is that probably a million people are building the exact same software at the moment.

turblety 1y ago
Isn't that beautiful. True competition. Shouldn't that be how the world works, businesses too? Lots of people, trying their best to build things, and some will share ideas, some with have their own unique points. Or do we just want CorporateSoftTM to build and own everything in just one big single commercial platform? I would love it if loads more businesses could start up.
- thrance 1y ago
  More like a severe lack of communication and visiblity leading to vastly inefficient work duplication.
  - turblety 1y ago
    I don't think an efficient marketplace is really a world anyone wants to live in. No one would have a job, purpose, creativity, anything really. What's the purpose if everything is efficent.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  No, dozens of companies burning money to reinvent the same thing, and the best product rarely wins anyway. You get locked into inferior systems just because they had better timing or marketing. The romantic startup vision sounds nice, but most of those businesses would just fail after wasting capital and talent that could've been used better elsewhere. It's messy and inefficient. >> Or do we just want CorporateSoftTM to build and own everything in just one big single commercial platform? It's gonna get acquired anyways... what do you think the endgame of 99% of startups is? Building a company?
  - theshrike79 1y ago

Jnr 1y ago

Looks similar to MetaMCP https://github.com/metatool-ai/metamcp https://github.com/metatool-ai/metamcp Not sure which of these tools is currently the best but they are clearly needed. I am testing MetaMCP to expose internal MCP servers to the cloud version of Claude, enabling me to use Home Assistant and some other internal services in verbal conversations with Claude app on the phone. I think 3rd party MCP server use is available in other AI assistants as well but Claude is the only one who allows using them in Europe. I can only wish that this would become a standard approach with any AI assistants, including the built in phone assistants like Siri, but Apple is so so far behind and always trying to squeeze every bit of money wherever they can, I doubt they will ever do that. This approach enables better integrations with local services specific to different regions, and I would somewhat compare this to RSS feeds which were popular 15 years ago. Would be nice if most e-commerce sites would provide their own MCP servers for managing carts, placing and tracking orders, etc. I don't want to see a world where single monopoly grabs this market and makes things shit again (like it happened with social media), especially for those who live outside of USA.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Agntcy is a little more elaborate, but also notable as a massive AI tool that includes tool management. Donated to Linux Foundation from Cisco & many others. https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/agntcy-donated-to-linux-foundation https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/agntcy-donated-to-linux-foun... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731621

theshrike79 1y ago

So from what I gather this would be useful at a company level. Everyone installs this gateway as their only "MCP", then at a central location we can add different MCP tools and everyone automatically gains access to them.

qwertox 1y ago

> Caution: The current release (0.6.0) is considered alpha / early beta. It is not production-ready and should only be used for local development, testing, or experimentation. Features, APIs, and behaviors are subject to change without notice. Do not deploy in production environments without thorough security review, validation and additional security mechanisms. Many of the features required for secure, large-scale, or multi-tenant production deployments are still on the project roadmap - which is itself evolving. IBM posting as if it were a solo open-source developer.

Haley_wu 1y ago

[dead]

willahmad 1y ago

I have built similar gateway but as a desktop application which runs locally and gives you a lot of control over enabled MCP tools and allows you to have a separate profiles for different combinations of MCP servers and credentials (e.g. profile with production API keys, sandbox keys and etc,.). give it a try here: https://getaiko.app/downloads https://getaiko.app/downloads

GloriousMEEPT 1y ago

Ah nice an AI generated MCP gateway. I can't wait to see how many different agent/tool protocols we'll run through this year, and how many gateways. I just spin up oauth2proxy to handle authentication with istio gateway. Maybe I should be deploying piles of unknown code instead?

pmig 1y ago
oauth2proxy actually doesn't work for MCP servers due to missing dynamic client registration..
- GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
  You're right, we're not strictly implementing things according to the spec/oauth 2.1

smcleod 1y ago

The best MCP Gateway I've found by far is Unla MCP Gateway - https://github.com/AmoyLab/Unla https://github.com/AmoyLab/Unla

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kenm47 1y ago

i built maybe don't ai's mcp gateway——but to me the interesting technology isn't about the registry or flattening of downstream MCP servers (honestly that was a reasonably easy problem to solve) it's about the behavior of the AI agents that are connecting to these servers and making very bad decisions. And yes to teh comments about people making a million of these... so very very many of them.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

This is awesome, I was just looking at scaffolding for doing something like this today. This needs to be able to support plugins to override behavior. I don't want my models having a giant tool registry, I want them to ask an oracle for the best 3 options, and I'd like to be able to inject specific behavior on a per MCP basis.

thecopy 1y ago
Hey, im building https://mcp-boss.com https://mcp-boss.com (MCP Gateway SaaS) and im looking for ways to improve the offering, and im interested in what you mean with "inject specific behavior on a per MCP basis"?
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  Just off the cuff I'm not sure a MCP manager has got quite the scope for a SAAS offering, at least not if you're just managing config. There might be a play at the enterprise level if you can integrate deeply with domain policy. Mostly I find working with MCPs pretty easy, but there is some minor benefit to hosting mcp servers that are more involved to set up. The thing that I would pay a small amount for (which is why I'm building it myself) is a MCP oracle that configures the MCP server set for an agent based on the task it's working on.
  - thecopy 1y ago
    Totally, its also the realisation have gotten too. Im working now to expand the offering to be able to run agents/sub-agents with Agent2Agent which all get access to the MCP:s. Although i believe too for development teams it might be valuable, all devs get automatically access to all services with 1-click install etc etc. But question is how unique/powerful is it.