8 posts tagged with "Model Context Protocol"

Two weeks ago I was mildly excited that AWS Cloud WAN had grown up enough to have proper BGP attributes.

Most teams building agent integrations are still wiring point to point URLs, API docs, and trust assumptions by hand. It works until scale shows up. Then everything gets brittle: stale endpoints, duplicated metadata, and too many side channels for discovery.

DNS-AID proposes a different approach: publish agent discovery metadata in DNS, under domains you already own, using SVCB from RFC 9460. Think "service discovery, but for agents" in the same spirit as SRV, ACME, OIDC discovery, and DNS-SD patterns.

My journey with AI tools has followed a pattern I've seen before with Microsoft: someone builds something useful, then Microsoft makes it native to where you already work. That turns out to matter more than being technically superior. Today, the GitHub Copilot app launched into public preview, and it's the clearest expression of that pattern I've seen yet.

I was having a chat with a long-time friend, Adam Sharif, about AI and in the conversation I mentioned that I had been meaning to write a BGP route server MCP proxy for a while. Cue an A-Team style musical montage and another evening lost to an ADHD hyperfocus session.

While rage coding a python MCP server for NetBox I realised I needed a better way to test it. You can use CURL to make requests of course but it turns out that there is a handy node.js package that provides comprehensive test capabilities for MCP servers.

Netbox open sourced their STDIO MCP server a while back and I have been playing around with it since then. The installation requires some local dependencies and the setup process was a bit tricky, but I managed to get it up and running with some trial and error. I found it substantially harder to set up and wouldn't necessarily trust that the sort of people who would benefit from having access to it would be able to easily set it up so I wanted to create a more user-friendly installation process by building an MCP server that runs remotely as a proxy to the Netbox API.

I've had some concerns around Model Context Protocol being a new fad to put another front end on poorly managed data, like the search appliances Google sold a decade and a half ago, but I had a play with the MCP server for Netbox and it's pretty handy.

Since Anthropic open sourced the Model Context Protocol last year there have been lots of notable implementations across many areas of tech. Every day I seem to see a breathless introduction on LinkedIn to some new MCP front end to a service or dataset.