[Keynote] The Missing Middle: The Shared Infrastructure MCP Needs Before It Hits a Million Servers

Abstract

MCP reached infrastructure currency in 13 weeks. CNCF took 13 months. That compression is the problem. The shared plumbing every production MCP deployment now reinvents, because no neutral open implementation exists yet, has to be built in months instead of years. This talk maps five missing layers of the MCP ecosystem and what each needs before the protocol scales two more orders of magnitude. 1. Discovery federation. One registry lookup does not survive public, private, and vendor registries coexisting. 2. Workload identity for servers. Not user OAuth. Who is this server, who signed it, what is it allowed to do? 3. Observability backbone. OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for MCP are still draft, so every gateway ships its own trace format. 4. Health and reputation signals. When seventeen servers are named github-mcp, which one should an agent trust? 5. Metering and cost attribution. Boring, load bearing, absent from the spec. For each layer: what exists today, where it breaks at scale, what a minimum viable open implementation needs. Attendees leave with a concrete map of which gaps are urgent, which are deferrable, and which are already being filled.