MCP Context Forge
ActiveDescription
An AI Gateway, registry, and proxy by IBM that sits in front of any MCP, A2A, or REST/gRPC APIs, exposing a unified endpoint with centralized discovery, guardrails, and management.
Key Features
- Unified gateway federating MCP, A2A, and REST/gRPC APIs with a single endpoint and centralized governance
- Tools Gateway with MCP, REST, gRPC-to-MCP translation, and TOON compression support
- Agent Gateway supporting A2A protocol, OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic agent routing
- 40+ plugins for additional transports, protocols, and integrations with extensible architecture
- OpenTelemetry observability with Phoenix, Jaeger, Zipkin, and other OTLP backends for distributed tracing
Use Cases
💡 Centralized API gateway for enterprise AI infrastructure managing multiple MCP and REST services
💡 Virtualizing legacy gRPC or REST APIs as MCP-compliant tools without rewriting backend code
💡 Observability and rate-limiting across federated AI agent and tool calling pipelines
💡 Multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments with Redis-backed federation and caching for scaling
Strengths & Limitations
✅ Strengths
- • Actively maintained, recent updates
- • High community interest (4.3k stars)
- • Permissive open-source license (Apache-2.0)
⚠️ Limitations
- • High issue backlog (1.3k open issues)
Tags
Categories
Quick Start
uvx --from mcp-contextforge-gateway mcp-contextforge-gateway. Set BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=pass, MCPGATEWAY_UI_ENABLED=true, PLATFORM_ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@example.com, PLATFORM_ADMIN_PASSWORD=changeme. Or Docker: docker pull ghcr.io/ibm/mcp-context-forge. Admin UI at http://localhost:8080.