MCP Gateway — when and how to use it

When you need it - Runtime discovery by skill/tags across many agents - A registry with visibility, RBAC, health and fitness scoring - Traffic shaping via tags (canary, tier) and safe rollouts

Local dev - Run a lightweight MCP instance at http://localhost:4444 - Point BFF/clients with MCP_BASE_URL=http://localhost:4444

Cloud - Deploy/consume a managed MCP; set MCP_BASE_URL (or use DOMAIN_SUFFIX + MCP_SERVICE_NAME) - Use MCP_BEARER_TOKEN for service-to-service auth

Discovery APIs (typical) - GET /discover/agents?skill=...&inputMode=...&outputMode=...&healthyOnly=true - GET /discover/servers?role=orchestrator&tags=...

Best practices - Keep MCP warm (minScale=1) for low latency discovery - Enforce RBAC + tenancy headers end-to-end - Emit heartbeats from agents/orchestrators with version & region tags