CURRENT

Microservices use .well-known URIs so clients learn about services before connecting. MCP's proposed equivalent, Server Cards (SEP-1649), would publish metadata at .well-known/mcp.json. Proven pattern, clean fit. But it's still a draft SEP with competing proposals. Today, every MCP client completes a full handshake just to learn what a server offers.

Distributed systems cracked this years ago: externalize state, keep compute stateless. MCP's Streamable HTTP transport carries stateful sessions requiring sticky routing that most cloud load balancers choke on. The 2026 roadmap targets stateless protocol evolution. For now, teams jury-rig HAProxy or Nginx workarounds and hope for the best.

API gateways centralize auth, routing, rate limiting, and audit logging. MCP has none of this in standardized form. Authorization doesn't propagate cleanly through proxies, session IDs may not survive traversal, and JSON-RPC payloads resist the middleware parsing that REST made routine. Named as unresolved on the roadmap. No working group yet.

OpenTelemetry gives microservices end-to-end trace propagation with a shared schema. Agent observability has commercial tooling (Arize, Langfuse, Braintrust) but nothing comparable for correlating traces across agent handoffs. With EU AI Act audit requirements arriving, this gap has a deadline. No MCP-native logging standard exists, and nobody owns the problem yet.

Service registries like Consul and etcd catalog what exists and where to find it. The MCP Registry preview shipped in September 2025 as an open catalog with an API. Solid start. But automated crawling depends on Server Cards, which haven't shipped. Without them, populating the registry means manual submissions or establishing full connections to each server.

REST, gRPC, and WebSockets coexist in distributed systems after years of consolidation and natural selection. Agent-to-agent communication has A2A (Google, 50+ partners, now under the Linux Foundation), ACP (IBM, drifting toward A2A), and ANP (decentralized). All under 18 months old. Multi-protocol coexistence looks likely, convergence does not.

The March 2026 MCP roadmap lists four priorities: transport scalability, agent communication, governance, enterprise readiness. But the real story is what it admits. Stateful sessions choke on load balancers. Enterprise requirements are left deliberately vague. The June spec release is tentative. The maintainers are asking practitioners to help fill the gaps, which is either admirable transparency or a tell about how much remains unsolved.

NIST's CAISI announced an AI Agent Standards Initiative in February covering interoperability, open-source protocols, and agent security. The RFI comment period closed March 9. Sector-specific listening sessions for finance, healthcare, and education start in April. Worth watching: federal involvement tends to shift the conversation from "should we govern this?" to "how fast can we?"

Two separate Gravitee-commissioned surveys (919 and 750 respondents) landed on nearly identical numbers: roughly 47% of enterprise AI agents operate without active monitoring or security oversight. Only 14.4% launch with full IT approval. Yes, it's vendor-sourced data. But two independent samples converging on the same figure is harder to dismiss.

Agent 365 goes generally available May 1 at $15/user/month. IT teams get deployment tracking, behavioral monitoring, and least-privilege enforcement across Microsoft's AI platforms. Every agent receives a governed identity through Entra Agent ID. Tens of millions of agents surfaced during the preview period alone, which tells you something about the inventory problem even inside a single vendor's ecosystem.

Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, contributing MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md as founding projects. Platinum members include AWS, Google, and Microsoft. The MCP Dev Summit lands in New York April 2–3 with 95-plus sessions. Formal governance distributes the stewardship question. Whether it resolves it is a different matter.

MarketsandMarkets pegs the AI agents market at $5.2 billion in 2024, growing to $52.6 billion by 2030. NVIDIA's State of AI 2026 survey finds 44% of companies already deploying or assessing agents. Gartner projects up to 40% of enterprise apps will feature agents by year-end. The capital is moving. The governance architecture, as every other card here suggests, has not kept pace.