MCP vs. API Gateways: They’re Not Interchangeable
SMRTR summary
Organizations rapidly adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect AI agents with enterprise services face a critical decision about gateway infrastructure. Unlike stateless REST APIs that carry routing information in HTTP headers, MCP operates through stateful JSON-RPC sessions where meaningful data lives in request bodies, creating incompatibilities with traditional API gateways designed for request-response patterns. While API gateways can provide basic passthrough proxying, they struggle with MCP's complex requirements like protocol brokering, streaming policy enforcement, and session multiplexing across multiple backend servers.
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