Agent Protocols in Production
MCP, A2A, and AIP in production: building enterprise MCP servers, cross-boundary agent collaboration, identity and delegation chains, and production pitfalls.
The compliance officer asked three questions: “Who authorized this action? What was the delegation chain? Can we reconstruct it after an incident?” The architect said: “We log everything.” The compliance officer said: “Logging what happened is not the same as proving who was authorized to make it happen.”
What this chapter covers
- Building production MCP servers — thin wrappers, gateways, catalogs, enterprise auth
- A2A across team boundaries — Agent Cards, task lifecycle, multi-turn negotiation
- The identity gap — why MCP and A2A solve connectivity but not accountability
- AIP deep dive — delegation chains, scope attenuation, the MCP auth proxy
- Complex use cases — financial services, healthcare, supply chain
- Production pitfalls — server sprawl, shadow connections, delegation debugging
- The adoption sequence — when to add each protocol layer
Get the full chapter
The complete chapter text is available in the book.