Answers to common enterprise questions about MCP discovery, governance, federation, OAuth, auth elicitation support, and observability. Can't find what you're looking for? Schedule a call.
An MCP gateway is the control and enforcement layer between AI clients and MCP servers. It centralizes 5 concerns for every MCP tool call: discovery, authentication, policy checks, routing, and auditing.
Instead of configuring each copilot directly against each MCP server, you expose 1 governed endpoint and enforce consistent policy for all clients.
The MCP Gateway focuses on tool, resource, and prompt invocation against MCP servers. The Agent Gateway focuses on autonomous agents and agent-to-agent orchestration.
Both are part of Jarvis Registry and share identity, policy, and observability controls, but they operate on different runtime objects and invocation models.
No. MCP federation imports existing MCP servers from AWS AgentCore and Azure AI Foundry into the Jarvis catalog without redeployment.
Servers continue running in their source environment while Jarvis applies unified RBAC, ACL, and audit policy at the gateway layer.
Jarvis connects to each provider, discovers MCP servers and capabilities, and syncs them into one governed namespace. Each imported server is then exposed through the same gateway endpoint used by native servers.
From the client perspective, cloud origin is transparent. Discovery and invocation behavior stays consistent across self-hosted, AWS, and Azure MCP servers.
Yes. Jarvis supports auth elicitation flows so MCP clients can be prompted to complete required authentication when a downstream server requires user consent or refreshed credentials.
This allows secure per-user authorization without exposing raw credentials to the client or bypassing enterprise identity policy.
Yes. The MCP Gateway validates resource indicators for token scope binding so a token intended for one MCP server cannot be replayed against another.
Jarvis enforces PKCE and standards-based OAuth behavior for inbound and outbound flows, including per-user token lifecycle controls.
Tokens and secrets are encrypted at rest and used server-side within your environment. Credentials are isolated per user and per downstream MCP server.
Silent refresh and revocation-aware handling ensure stable access while maintaining least-privilege posture and auditability.
Jarvis applies RBAC and ACL policy at tool level on every invocation. Users and service identities see only the tools they are authorized to discover and invoke.
Policy decisions are enforced at runtime and captured in the audit stream for compliance review.
Yes. You can scope policy by role, group, environment, server, and individual tool actions. This supports strict separation across dev, staging, and production.
Central policy management avoids drift and keeps enforcement consistent across every connected copilot.
Jarvis emits trace and audit telemetry for discovery and invocation events, including user identity context, policy decision, target server, and result status.
Telemetry is OTLP-compatible and can be forwarded to Datadog, Grafana, and other enterprise observability backends.
The most common causes are missing policy scope, expired downstream credentials, unsupported auth state, or schema mismatches between client input and tool contract.
Jarvis surfaces policy and auth failure details in logs so teams can quickly determine whether the issue is access, token state, or request format.
Because the gateway sits between clients and servers, the fastest rollback is a policy change rather than a redeploy: scope the affected tool out of the ACL and every client stops reaching it on the next invocation, with no client-side coordination.
The underlying server can then be fixed or reverted on its own schedule. Restoring the ACL entry brings it back, and the audit trail shows exactly which calls happened in the window between the two policy versions.
A gateway that holds credentials for many downstream servers has to prove those credentials cannot be replayed across them. That is an authorisation-design question, so every row below names the specification that answers it.
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Protocol | Model Context Protocol (MCP), published November 2024, over JSON-RPC 2.0 |
| Server redeploys required | 0 — servers keep their host, runtime, and release cadence |
| Integration surface | 1 governed endpoint publishing every approved server |
| Base authorization | OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749), Bearer usage per RFC 6750 |
| Token scoping | Resource Indicators (RFC 8707) — a token minted for 1 server is not valid at another |
| Delegation | OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693) |
| Public-client flows | PKCE (RFC 7636) |
| Token format | JSON Web Token (RFC 7519), signed per RFC 7515 |
| Auth elicitation | Supported — downstream credentials can be requested mid-session |
| Identity federation | OpenID Connect Core 1.0 and SAML 2.0 |
| Access model | Per-tool ACL evaluated on every invocation |
| Rollback path | 1 policy change — no client-side coordination, effective on next invocation |
| Transport security | TLS 1.2 minimum, TLS 1.3 preferred (RFC 8446) |
| Telemetry | OpenTelemetry OTLP — call, policy decision, and latency per invocation |
| Denial responses | HTTP 401 unauthenticated, HTTP 403 policy denial, HTTP 429 rate limited |
| Runtimes | 3 managed Kubernetes services — Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE |
| Zero-trust reference | NIST SP 800-207 (2020) |
A worked example of 1 MCP server reached through the gateway — discovery, authorisation, and the resulting audit record — using GitHub as the connected system.
The MCP Gateway is the component of Jarvis Registry that fronts Model Context Protocol servers. It is built by ASCENDING, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner. These 6 rows cover the questions that decide whether a gateway fits an existing MCP estate.
| Concern | How the MCP Gateway handles it |
|---|---|
| Discovery | One endpoint publishes every approved MCP server, so a client integrates once instead of once per server. |
| Existing servers | MCP servers stay where they are. Registration is configuration only — no redeploy and no protocol shim. |
| Authorisation | OAuth 2.0 with resource indicators (RFC 8707), so a token issued for one MCP server is not replayable against another. |
| Auth elicitation | Supported, so a tool can prompt for the downstream credential it needs mid-session instead of failing the call. |
| Access policy | Per-tool ACL entries evaluated on every invocation, layered on top of Azure EntraID roles. |
| Telemetry | An OpenTelemetry collector captures each call, its policy decision, and its latency for troubleshooting and audit. |
Adopting the gateway does not require touching the MCP servers themselves, which is why most teams complete these 5 steps inside a single change window rather than a migration project.
The gateway is where tool sprawl becomes a governed catalog: servers are discovered automatically, then exposed only through explicit policy.
The MCP Gateway and the Agent Gateway are the two halves of Jarvis Registry. These pages cover each in more depth.
The gateway implements published specifications end to end. These are the documents worth reading before an architecture review.
Our team is happy to walk you through architecture, security, and pricing specific to your environment.
