This is obviously not what it is. If I give you APIGW would you be able to implement an MCP server with full functionality without a large amount of middleware?

If I gave you that could you implement Graphql from scratch without a large amount of middleware? Or are we now saying graphql api:s are not api:s?

Sorry, could you rephrase that?

I’ve implemented an MCP tool calling client for my application, alongside OAuth for it. It was hard but no harder than anything else similar. I implemented a client for interference with the OpenAI API spec for general inference providers, and it was similarly as hard. MCP. SDKs help make it easy; MCP servers are dead simple. Clients are the hard part, IMO.

MCP is basically just an RPC API that uses HTTP and JSON, with some other features useful for AI agents today.

Does MCP support authentication, SSO?

It supports OAuth, IIRC. But I suppose the internal chatbot itself would require auth, and pass that down to the tools it calls.

The chatbot app initiates an OAuth flow, user SSOs, chatbot app receives tokens to its callback URL, then tool calls can access whatever the user can access.

If you use the official MCP SDK, it has interfaces you implement for auth, so all you need to do is kick off the OAuth flow with a URL it figures out and hands you, storing the resulting tokens and producing them when requested. It also handles using refresh tokens, so there's just a bit of light friendly owl finishing on top.

Source: I just implemented this for our (F100) internal provider and model agnostic chat app. People can't seem to see past the coding agents they're running on their own machines when MCP comes up.

Neat!

Yes it’s literally just standard OAuth that’s defined in the MCP spec. I spent this week implementing an auth layer for my app’s MCP client gateway.