By Dao Feng, Lv Shui and Shi Mian
This March, the MCP protocol became a new hotspot in AI, widely recognized by most people. At that time, Higress quickly responded by adding an MCP protocol conversion feature, for more details see: https://higress.cn/ai/mcp-quick-start
This solution addresses the following issues:
Once this feature was launched, it quickly garnered widespread attention from the open-source community. Additionally, many users reported configuration failures in the discussion groups, as the feature was too atomic and complex, leading to frequent configuration failures. To further enhance user experience, we decided to integrate Higress MCP-related capabilities in a scenario-based manner within the Higress Console, specifically the MCP service management module.
Users can officially experience all the features mentioned in this article in version 2.1.5 of Higress.
The Higress MCP service management module provides the following capabilities:
From the perspective of an open-source contributor to Higress, I would like to clarify Higress's own positioning. Its primary role is still as an AI gateway/MCP gateway, serving as infrastructure to help enterprises better build their MCP market. The MCP features it provides can be very friendly combined with scenarios such as MCP application stores (like mcp.so), MCP client markets (Cline, Cursor, Cherry Studio), and platform markets (Bailian, Modao, Dify); Higress is not in competition with these scenarios.
Previously, Higress officially released a SaaS version of the MCP market: mcp.higress.ai, which is entirely built on Higress MCP service management. Currently, the front-end and back-end code has not been open-sourced, and relevant capabilities are provided for user use in a SaaS format, serving merely as a functionality demo, allowing users to refer to the interactions on mcp.higress.ai to build their own MCP market based on Higress.
If you are building an enterprise privatized MCP market, you will definitely be concerned about the relationship between Higress MCP service management, Nacos 3.0, and the MCP market introduced in this article. Here are some clarifications.
Some enterprises have a demand for building their own MCP market. Higress MCP service management is merely a console representation of Higress MCP-related atomic capabilities, aiming to provide users with a more user-friendly interface, and it also provides the capability of integrating OpenAPI. It can be an important component of the enterprise privatized MCP market, but this single component is not sufficient to fully support all scene requirements.
Nacos 3.0 provides the capability of MCP Registry. In building an enterprise-level MCP market, Higress acts as the MCP Proxy, while Nacos assumes the role of MCP Registry, allowing Nacos to better gather market information and manage the runtime of the MCP Server. In the future, Higress will also have deeper integration with Nacos MCP Registry at the product level, forming an overall solution for the MCP market.
In the open-source self-built scenario: It is recommended to integrate Higress Console's OpenAPI or admin-sdk, along with Nacos MCP Registry. Enterprises should then develop a front-end and back-end application that conforms to the enterprise privatization identity to create their own privatized MCP market.
In the Alibaba Cloud commercialization scenario: Alibaba Cloud's Public Cloud API Gateway and the Enterprise Edition API Gateway plan to launch an out-of-the-box MCP market. This solution will be based on MCP service management and Nacos 3.0 to package a higher-level application that plans to offer two modes for commercial users to choose from:
Below, we will focus on introducing the three service types of Higress MCP service management: OpenAPI conversion MCP, MCP direct routing, and DB conversion MCP, as well as the business scenarios they each support.
When enterprises develop MCP Server for AI Agents, they can generally be categorized into two types of scenarios: existing scenarios and incremental scenarios. Existing scenarios refer to the IT assets already possessed by enterprises. Using the e-commerce scenario as an example, systems such as order systems, product systems, and address systems—which need to have the capability of being called by AI Agents—must be MCP-ified; incremental scenarios refer to MCP tools developed specifically for the better operation of AI Agents, with a typical example being the amap MCP Server provided by Amap.
Before providing the amap MCP Server, the Amap team also had a complete set of amap OpenAPI, although it was previously designed for traditional application calls. If the business teams of most enterprises are willing to invest a lot of effort and determination, they can certainly write out high-quality products like the amap MCP Server. However, the reality is that existing business within enterprises often has many concerns:
Once a new technology involves modifications to existing systems, coupled with a high barrier for the selected modification plan, it is highly likely that the transformation cannot be implemented, ultimately leading to disorder within the enterprise.
The OpenAPI conversion MCP feature offered by Higress is certainly not the only MCP access solution, but its advantages are very prominent:
With this feature of Higress, businesses can focus more on describing MCP tools and how to better collaborate with Agents, rather than on how to implement MCP Server code, significantly enhancing the efficiency of business intelligence processes.
Next, we will use the interface of Higress Console to provide a more intuitive feature introduction.
In the AI gateway management - MCP management menu, selecting to create an MCP service allows the creation of a service type for OpenAPI MCP.
Selecting the MCP service enables editing tool operations. On this page, both Swagger and YAML modes are supported.
Viewing the tool list:
Under the basic information and tool list, the information for SSE/Streamable access points can also be directly viewed for MCP clients to connect.
In the OpenAPI conversion MCP scenario, I mentioned both existing and incremental scenarios. While I personally believe that existing business scenarios dominate, we cannot exclude cases where some prefer to develop their own MCP Server, and there has also emerged a large number of MCP Servers in the open-source MCP market. Considering this situation, Higress offers the MCP direct routing solution to connect with backend services using the SSE/Streamable protocol.
Some readers may wonder why, if they develop their own MCP Server and can connect directly with MCP clients, they still need to proxy through Higress. My view is that Higress serves as the MCP gateway here, with the following advantages:
In fact, in both the current and future feature planning within Higress, MCP has always been regarded as an API type, with API types under AI scenarios including:
Combining this with traditional API gateway types:
This can further lead to discussions on API & AI open platforms, although all of this is still in the exploratory stage. You can follow the Higress community to learn about future related developments.
The DB conversion MCP Server capability provided by HIgress allows users to generate instance-level MCP Servers by simply providing the necessary connection information for the database (username, password, domain/IP, port), without the need for code writing or providing runtime resources.
This feature is still in the exploratory phase, so please note the following limitations:
The DB conversion MCP is an attempt by Higress to generalize certain database and middleware components into MCP, presenting a potential direction for future evolution. We also hope to receive more feedback from users.
Based on this feature, in the future, Higress could also evolve to provide SQL MCP BI capabilities to compose SQL that matches business scenarios and convert it into MCP tools for intelligent analysis by upper-layer businesses, formatted as follows:
db_tool:
name: xxxx
kind: postgres-sql
source: my-pg-source # 通过 name 关联到对应 db_source
# tools 所需元数据
name: search-hotels-by-name # tools 的名
description: Search for hotels based on name. # tools 的描述
inputSchema: # 内容为自定义的 RawMessage
- type: string
properties:
table:
type: string
description: 'hotel name'
required:
- table
# 执行语句
statement: SELECT * FROM hotels WHERE name ILIKE '%' || $1 || '%';Other Higress open-source contributors are also welcome to participate in contributing to this feature.
The MCP community is currently focused on user-level permission management regarding the authentication scheme. To fully apply this set of schemes in enterprises, it is necessary to dive into the employee account system of the enterprise—transitioning from role-based permissions to user-based permissions.
Under this PR lead, the community has now accepted an authentication scheme based on the OAuth2 PRM (Protected Resource Metadata) draft, and it has already been released in the latest version.
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/pull/284#issuecomment-2825122408
In simple terms, it separates the responsibilities of the Auth Server from the MCP Server. When an MCP Client requests the MCP Server without credentials, the MCP Server returns 401 and provides PRM information, instructing the MCP Client to obtain a Token from the Auth Server. After receiving the Token, the MCP Client can then request the MCP Server.
This scheme addresses the issue of auto-discovering authentication endpoints for communication between MCP Client and MCP Server, but the overall scheme will likely face significant resistance during large-scale landing of the MCP client ecosystem, and its complexity and idealism may pose challenges during enterprise-level implementation.
Additionally, there's an interesting point: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/544 — the Alibaba Cloud security team raised potential security risks during the design process of this scheme, and this issue was just fixed last week.
We assess that even if the standardized authentication scheme established by the MCP community achieves technical breakthroughs, it will still encounter some resistance during enterprise implementation processes. In light of this, Higress has combined its gateway authentication scenarios and common user demands to provide a gateway-side authentication scheme.
Authentication for Higress MCP Server consists of two parts: one happens between the MCP Client and Higress (downstream), and the other happens from Higress to the MCP Server (upstream).
The MCP community does not clearly specify the authentication methods for remote MCP Server implementations. One possibility is that the types of backend services cannot be enumerated. Higress's conversion capabilities offer some conventions.
Higress offers the following out-of-the-box authentication capabilities based on the OpenAPI 3.0 specifications:
Thus, if the OAS 3.0 document in the OpenAPI conversion MCP scenario includes authentication and credentials for backend services, Higress will also use these credentials to access the backend services.
As an MCP gateway, one of Higress's main values is to provide unified authentication management for the MCP Server. It is recommended to adopt an API Key-based authentication scheme, consistent with the AI gateway scenarios when acting as a model service proxy.
The downstream authentication for MCP services, which is the authentication method on the gateway side, offers a user experience similar to routing and AI routing. Familiarity with gateway authentication plugins will make this scheme feel familiar.
Additionally, the support for transparent authentication credential passing will be provided in the future to address some certification needs for MCP direct routing.
| Higress Open Source | Alibaba Cloud API Gateway (Public Cloud) | Alibaba Cloud API Gateway (Enterprise Edition) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAPI Conversion MCP | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| MCP Direct Routing | Supports SSE/Streamable | Supports SSE/Streamable, plans to support Stdio | Supports SSE/Streamable, plans to support Stdio |
| MCP Server Authentication and Authorization | API Key | API Key/JWT/OAuth2 and other authentication methods | API Key/JWT/OAuth2 and other authentication methods |
| MCP Server Tool Granularity Authorization | No plans | Supported | Supported |
| MCP Server Tool Granularity Quota Limiting | No plans | Planned support (July) | Planned support (July) |
| MCP Server Tool Granularity Observability | No plans | Planned support (July) | Planned support (July) |
| MCP Server Security Barriers | No plans | Planned support (July) | Planned support (July) |
| MCP Server Tool Assembly Mechanism (Combine tools from any server to create a new Server) |
No plans | Planned support (July) | Planned support (July) |
| MCP Marketplace | Provides two modes for user selection: + Mode 1: Out-of-the-box providing scalable and customizable self-built instantiated MCP market + Mode 2: Providing MCP market source code for enterprise users for secondary development. |
Provides two modes for user selection: + Mode 1: Out-of-the-box providing scalable and customizable self-built instantiated MCP market + Mode 2: Providing MCP market source code for enterprise users for secondary development. |
Provides two modes for user selection: + Mode 1: Out-of-the-box providing scalable and customizable self-built instantiated MCP market + Mode 2: Providing MCP market source code for enterprise users for secondary development. |
We welcome more partners to participate in the construction of the Higress community. To keep up with more community dynamics, you can join the
Higress Community Communication Group 3 DingTalk group number: 107690002780
Higress Community WeChat group QR code:(If the group is full, add zjjxg2018 to join the group)
If you want to learn more about Alibaba Cloud API Gateway (Higress), please click: https://higress.ai/en/
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