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MCP
40 posts about MCP. Every summary links to the original.
AWS ·
MCP went stateless: Is your AWS MCP server deployment well-architected?
MCP 2026-07-28 removes the initialize handshake and Mcp-Session-Id, making the protocol core stateless and changing how remote servers scale on AWS. Requests carry protocol version and client context, while server/discover can expose versions, capabilities, and identity; continuity remains possible through server-minted identifiers passed in tool arguments and stored application state. It covers round-robin routing, header-based gateway signals, cache freshness fields, W3C Trace Context, idempotent tools, and Multi Round-Trip Requests for input-dependent calls. It recommends retaining sticky routing and session stores for 2025-era clients, then migrating after legacy traffic reaches zero and validating against the official conformance suite. The conclusion is that the revision aligns remote MCP deployments with AWS Well-Architected practices and permits removal of infrastructure required only by the old protocol.
Anand KomandooruAuth0 ·
How to Make Your AI Agent Enterprise-Ready: Enabling Enterprise-Managed Authorization for Client Apps in Auth0
Auth0 is launching Early Access for Client App, or Requesting App, capabilities that support Cross App Access (XAA) for AI assistants, developer tools, and autonomous agents. In the Enterprise-Managed Authorization (EMA) model, an employee’s corporate SSO login can authorize access to external APIs or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers through the IETF Identity Assertion Authorization Grant (ID-JAG) draft specification. Auth0’s Token Vault brokers the multi-hop exchange: it stores an upstream enterprise refresh token, retrieves a short-lived ID-JAG, exchanges it with the downstream Resource App, and returns a standard access token to the backend. Setup uses dashboard toggles and connection settings, followed by a standard /oauth/token federated exchange, while the API requires no XAA-specific changes. The release also describes audit logging, enterprise IdP policy control, OIN distribution, and caching downstream tokens because ID-JAG exchanges are rate-limited to 50% of the tier’s standard Auth API limit.
name: "Mira Sharma"Auth0 ·
Securing Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is moving from AI-assisted product discovery toward purchases completed by agents, but retail systems often cannot reliably establish the shopper’s identity or spending authority. The post describes four phases—product discovery, checkout functions, delegate-to-buy, and agent-to-agent commerce—and notes standards including UCP, ACP, and AP2. Auth0’s approach combines user authentication, asynchronous authorization, and authentication for MCP, using CIMD-based agent registration, OAuth, and on-behalf-of token exchange to issue temporary, scoped transaction access. It presents third-party shopping agents and retailer-owned agents as two deployment models, with actions tied to an authenticated shopper and recorded for auditability. The proposed identity layer can sit alongside an existing identity provider while supporting emerging protocols and future autonomous purchasing.
Bradford PeirceRed Hat ·
AI-powered multicluster management: Querying fleet health with OpenShift Lightspeed and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management
Managing modern large-scale Kubernetes fleets across distributed clusters can make troubleshooting slow because administrators must build manual search queries and sift scattered outputs. The post presents a Technology Preview MCP server for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management that translates natural-language prompts into structured searches across managed clusters, deployed with Helm in the hub cluster. OpenShift Lightspeed is configured through its OLSConfig custom resource to call the MCP endpoint, use a Kubernetes service-account token for internal authorization, and optionally skip approval for read-only searches. The examples cover finding clusters below OpenShift 4.21, locating pods in a specified cluster and namespace, and identifying an unhealthy VM across the fleet; one result finds dev-vm in an ErrorUnschedulable condition and provides diagnostic guidance.
Diego Alvarez Ponce, Luiz Bernardo LevenhagenHow Scottish Water Made Its Capital Investment Data Conversational With Databricks Genie
Scottish Water’s Capital Investment teams had project data, reports, and metrics available, but non-technical users often struggled to find answers, creating duplicated reporting and delays. SPARK addresses this access problem through a natural-language interface in Microsoft Teams: Copilot routes questions via a supervisor agent and MCP to the Databricks Genie Agent, which queries governed Unity Catalog data. The implementation curates use-case data in a gold layer, adds metric views as a semantic layer, and configures business rules, examples, benchmarking, feedback, and monitoring for accuracy and performance. Environment-parameterised Databricks Asset Bundles, separate environments, Azure DevOps approvals, Entra ID, and Key Vault support repeatable deployment. The post reports lookup journeys shrinking from around eight clicks or four to five search steps to a direct question, with an estimated 520 to 1,300 hours saved annually under a stated usage scenario.
Sourav Gulati, Poppy HarveyWhat is Tool Calling?
Tool calling lets an AI model interact with external tools, APIs, and systems to retrieve information or perform actions beyond its training data, turning a conversational model into an agent that can act. The process is an application-mediated loop: the model recognizes when outside help is needed, selects a tool from schema-described options, emits a structured request—typically JSON—and receives the result as context for its response or next step. Available tools can support information retrieval, code execution, process automation, and smart-device or IoT monitoring, while complex tasks may chain multiple calls into a workflow. The piece also distinguishes tool calling from function calling, describing the latter as a subset, and presents MCP as a standardization layer for describing, discovering, and invoking tools, with Databricks Agent Bricks offering governed integrations and agent-development support.
Databricks StaffUnity AI Gateway is Generally Available
Unity AI Gateway is generally available as a centralized way for enterprises to manage AI costs, security, governance, and model choice across agents and other AI assets. It positions Unity AI Gateway alongside Unity Catalog: Unity Catalog supplies identity, permissions, lineage, and auditing, while the gateway applies runtime guardrails and contextual policies across AI interactions. The gateway centralizes usage data in Unity Catalog, offering dashboards, Genie-powered analysis, granular cost attribution, budgets, hard spend caps, and a single-query API for frontier models from providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Kimi, and GLM. Smart Routing is in beta and dynamically selects models using quality, cost, performance, availability, and budget; the announcement says customers already use the gateway at scale, including more than one quadrillion tokens passing through it in the past year.
David Nasi, Stefania Leone, Kevin Stumpf, Kasey Uhlenhuth, Kelly AlbanoAgentic media buying cannot scale without the right foundation. See how buyers and sellers get there on Databricks.
Media buying remains slowed by fragmented coordination across emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, and phone calls, leaving teams to research inventory, compare pricing, negotiate, and issue orders manually. The post presents an agentic workflow in which buyer and seller agents discover inventory, negotiate prices, and book deals through IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP standards, including AdCOM, OpenDirect, OpenRTB deals, and registry-based discovery and trust. Its Databricks implementation runs self-contained applications on Databricks Apps, with CrewAI agent crews using Databricks Foundation Model APIs and Claude models, Lakebase providing transactional Postgres state, and MLflow tracing capturing decisions and tool calls. The example processes a $200,000 Q3 Brand Launch across CTV and Linear TV with a $38 CPM ceiling, and is packaged as a Databricks Automation Bundle accelerator deployable with a single command.
Joe Hu, Mandy Baker, Luke BarnesHow the FDA Built an AI Platform That 85% of Its Staff Now Use Daily
The FDA built ELSA, a generative AI platform for its 16,000 staff, on Halo, a governed Databricks data foundation created to address fragmented systems across eight centers. Those centers had separate chatbots and data stores; consolidating 50 to 60 sources enabled faster sharing, real-time streaming, and centralized access controls through Unity Catalog. Within roughly two months, ELSA adoption rose from less than 1% to 85%, while staff began building hundreds of agents weekly from standard operating procedures, regulatory guidance, and center-specific documents. MCP servers layered over Unity Catalog make governed data and tooling accessible beyond data scientists, and Databricks ML and NLP capabilities through MLflow extracted starting materials and product-supplier-manufacturer relationships from millions of submission pages. A reviewer can now request grounded starting-material information for a drug application in about three minutes instead of days, while the FDA adapts center-specific MCP tools and extends the model across its organization.
Molly Just-BehrProvisioning for the Agentic Era: How Databricks Built a Self-Serve Infrastructure Vending Machine
Databricks built the Field Engineering Vending Machine (FEVM) to replace shared environments with isolated, centrally governed infrastructure for its growing field organization. Users or agents describe a use case and configuration details, receiving an environment assembled through a React frontend, Python backend, Databricks Apps, Terraform, Git Runner, and Lakebase across AWS, Azure, and GCP. FEVM supports templates and add-ons such as Lakebase, notebooks, and pre-packaged assets from UC Volumes, applies configurable time-to-live policies, and sends Slack notifications for provisioning, expiration, and deletion. It also manages shared resources independently, including catalogs that persist across workspace lifecycles, and provides administrative controls for limits and audits. At the time described, it managed more than 2,600 active deployments across three clouds and over 5,000 active users, after handling nearly 1,200 requests during one internal event.
Evan Pandya, Greg Wood, Joel ThomasWhy R&D Data Belongs in the Lakehouse - and Why Agents Need It There
cellcentric describes how it built a governed lakehouse foundation for R&D data so industrial AI agents can reason over engineering context, not isolated source-system records. On Azure and Databricks, the Data Hub combines Unity Catalog governance, Lakehouse Federation, Delta Sharing, Declarative Automation Bundles, and an MCP interface for agents. Its Fuel Cell Passport unifies five enterprise systems, models seven hierarchy levels, refreshes daily, and uses a state-based temporal model for point-in-time configuration and rework-history questions. The platform treats context coverage as a data-quality metric, with 27 published products averaging 90% column-comment coverage, while authenticated user identity and Unity Catalog authorization constrain agent access. For many R&D and process-development workflows, work that once took weeks now ships in days, though complex multi-source investigations still require substantial domain review.
Sebastian Eberhardt, Dominik Bentele, Jonathan BräuerAsk, build, compose: What our 5th Genie Hackathon taught us about Databricks Genie
The fifth Databricks hackathon used Databricks Genie to test three ways of working with governed data: asking, building, and composing. Genie Agents give business users domain-specific natural-language access to curated data, while Genie Code helps analysts create metric views, functions, pipelines, and dashboards inside Databricks. The composition track uses Conversation APIs and a managed MCP server to make Genie an agent tool alongside custom logic, Model Serving, and other MCP servers, with Unity Catalog governing access. Projects included supervisory routing across 190 tables, governance and analytics products built in days, and multi-agent systems such as ShipBob’s overnight operations brief. Across the tracks, the stated lesson is that shared governance and semantic context let business users, builders, and engineers use Genie at different levels without abandoning grounded, permissioned data access.
Shruti Prasanna, Rob BajraOpenAI and Databricks at DAIS 2026: Making enterprise AI real
At Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks and OpenAI presented a partnership centered on combining OpenAI’s frontier models and agents with Databricks’ enterprise context and control. The post describes GPT models and Codex running natively on Databricks, with Unity AI Gateway governing interactions, budgets, routing, auditing, and visibility, while Agent Tools provide governed enterprise data access through MCPs. Examples include OpenAI’s marketing data foundation on Databricks, which cut storage costs by $400,000 per month, and a Hertz application built in 11 business days with GPT-5.5 and Databricks that lifted lead conversion from 60–65% to 75–80%. The sessions argue that deployment, security, evaluation, monitoring, context, and sharing comprise most of the work around enterprise agents. A joint virtual event scheduled for August will address shipping agentic applications at scale, including a Stellantis case study.
Margaret AmoriGenesis Workbench: A blueprint for industry AI in life sciences, powered by Databricks and NVIDIA
Genesis Workbench is an open blueprint for a Databricks-native life-sciences application that brings computational drug-discovery stages into one governed workbench. It combines Unity Catalog governance, MLflow tracking, Model Serving, serverless GPU compute, Databricks AI Search, and NVIDIA technologies including CUDA-X libraries, Parabricks, BioNeMo tools, GenMol, and Proteina-Complexa. Independent modules cover genomics, single-cell analysis, large- and small-molecule workflows, and model fine-tuning, with handoffs spanning gene-to-sequence resolution, structure prediction, docking, ADMET, and candidate ranking. A point-and-click React interface supports bench scientists, while declarative workflow generation and MCP exposure let pipelines and external clients use the workbench; inference runs on GPU endpoints inside the governed workspace without runtime external API dependencies. The stated aim is to let teams move from disease hypotheses to ranked therapeutic candidates on their own data, with a roadmap for automated workflow generation, BioNeMo Skills integration, and additional MCP services.
Mark Lee, Srijit NairGuide to Agentic Systems and AI Agents
Agentic AI systems are goal-directed software platforms that perceive context, plan and execute multi-step workflows, and adapt based on outcomes with minimal human intervention. The guide distinguishes them from traditional and generative AI, defining agents, broader system architecture, and the role of LLMs as reasoning cores connected to memory, APIs, databases, and other tools. It describes a perceive-reason-act-learn loop, multi-step planning, external tool integration through interfaces such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and orchestration patterns for coordinating specialized agents. Production concerns include retries, queues, observability, permissions, privacy, logging, and human escalation, while stated risks include reward-hacking, unintended actions, and explainability gaps. It identifies repetitive, data-rich workflows with clear success criteria and bounded error consequences as the best current enterprise candidates.
Databricks StaffAgent Bricks: Data + AI Summit 2026
At Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks announced Agent Bricks as a comprehensive developer platform for building and operating agents, extending a product launched the previous year. The announcement frames the core agent loop as only 1% of the work, with token capacity, deployment, security, evaluation, monitoring, context, and sharing forming the remaining infrastructure burden. Agent Bricks addresses choice, context, and control through support for multiple proprietary, open-source, and custom models, any agent harness, MCP-connected data, Genie Ontology, managed memory, document intelligence, sandboxes, and governed tools. Unity AI Gateway adds catalogs, fine-grained access controls, budgets, traffic routing, contextual policies, monitoring, and registry support for agents, tools, and models. Databricks says more than 100,000 agents have been built and customers including AstraZeneca, 7-Eleven, Fox Corporation, and Block have shipped agents on the platform.
Hanlin Tang, Kasey Uhlenhuth, Akhil Gupta, Patrick WendellAI governance at Data + AI Summit 2026: What’s new with Unity AI Gateway
Databricks announces new Unity AI Gateway capabilities for governing enterprise AI as organizations operate multi-model, multi-agent, and multi-vendor estates connected to models, MCP services, APIs, and tools. The update adds unified spend visibility, granular attribution, hard spend caps, and smart routing, alongside Unity Catalog support for registering and governing models, MCP services, agents, and skills. Contextual Service Policies, in Beta, can allow, deny, or require approval for actions based on users, agents, models, tools, services, or request and response contents, with guardrails for risks such as PII exposure and prompt injection. The announcement also covers end-to-end tracing, coding-agent analysis with Genie, incident investigation with Lakewatch, ecosystem integrations, and Managed Omnigent on Databricks in Beta.
David Nasi, Stefania Leone, Ahmed Bilal, Kevin Stumpf, Martin Grund, Vladimir Kolovski, Kelly AlbanoIntroducing Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Ontology
Databricks announces Genie One, Genie Agents, and Genie Ontology to help enterprises answer business questions and act on data whose context is scattered across dashboards, queries, documents, tickets, and chats. Genie One connects data and business tools through Lakehouse federation, Lakeflow Connect, native integrations, Slack, Teams, mobile apps, schedules, alerts, document creation, custom skills, and MCP support. Genie Agents evolve Genie Spaces into domain-specific agents that can reason over structured and unstructured data, execute multi-step workflows, and be created from a prompt. Genie Ontology builds a permission-aware living graph from enterprise assets, weighting sources by authority, usage, certification, and freshness. In an internal 28-question benchmark, Genie answered 84.5% correctly on the first attempt and delivered twice the speed of the strongest coding agent.
Sydney Sundell, Ken Wong, Elise GeorisEmpower your healthcare agents with ready-to-use MCP on Databricks Marketplace
Databricks announces ready-to-use Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for healthcare and life sciences through Databricks Marketplace, addressing the need to combine curated biomedical knowledge, timely data, specialized tools, and private records. Listings include services for drug and target intelligence, literature, clinical trials, FDA information, Medicare coverage, ontologies, real-world evidence, clinical semantics, and interoperability, while Climb connects live public sources with private Gold-layer data under Unity Catalog governance. Marketplace and custom MCP servers are centralized in the MCP Catalog and governed by Unity AI Gateway, with Genie Spaces, AI Search, Unity Catalog functions, and SQL Warehouses available as managed MCP servers. Users can assemble agents in AI Playground, Agent Bricks, or notebooks, then deploy endpoints or apps with MLflow tracing, evaluation, human feedback, and AI guardrails; examples span molecular-property lookup, clinical questions, and drug research.
Yen Low, Mark Lee, Matthew Giglia, Nicholas Siebenlist, Jay Bhankharia, Paul Ford, Itai WeissHow Ecolab rebuilt retail intelligence on Databricks and Anthropic Claude
Ecolab needed to combine audits, health inspections, pest telemetry, and other data from nine systems so retail teams could answer location-specific compliance questions. Its Retail Intelligence application is a native Databricks App using Lakebase Postgres, Lakeflow, and Spark Declarative Pipelines to move governed data into a Unity Catalog lakehouse, while Foundation Model APIs serve Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku, and Gemini. A Coordinator Agent delegates requests to specialized agents that use Vector Search, SQL, Unity Catalog Functions, and an external MCP server; a Response Agent returns cited answers, with short- and long-term memory stored through Lakebase. The system also applies five Judge LLMs, MLflow tracing, and ai_query() batch inference. Report preparation fell from two weeks to under two minutes, while the assistant supports approximately twelve languages at about 98% accuracy.
Babu Chinnaswamy, Nicholas Dylla, Alissa Ellingson, Harish Gaur
