• MCP Ecosystem and Registry: The [Model Context Protocol (MCP)] ecosystem is formalizing a public registry for server discovery. This month, the MCP team launched a preview of the official MCP Registry. The Linux Foundation accepted Solo.io’s Agentgateway project. MCP gives IDEs and agents a standard way to communicate with tools and data, like a USB-C port. The registry publishes a machine-readable catalog of servers that clients can query and install. It emphasizes federated discovery rather than a single list and has a moderation process with a caveat about breaking changes during the preview.
• Agentgateway Project: It positions itself as a data plane for agentic systems, intended to govern agent-to-agent, agent-to-tool, and agent-to-LLM interactions. It supports emerging protocols like A2A and MCP and provides a centralized and secure management layer for AI agent interactions.
• Developer Flow: MCP clients can query the registry API and install servers easily. Teams with containerized distribution can follow Docker’s efforts. Agentgateway offers a single ingress for platform teams to enforce authN/Z, rate limits, etc.
• Trade-offs: Centralized discovery raises curation and governance questions. The MCP Registry has no durability guarantees during preview. Agentgateway is early in its lifecycle and needs validation in environments. The MCP roadmap calls for better versioning, metadata, and hooks.
• Conclusion: Agentgateway is the first data plane for AI agents. Combined with MCP, they offer a path to safer scale. Developers can explore the MCP and Agentgateway repositories to learn more.