MCP Gateway reverse proxy for MCP servers — Microsoft, now requiring 2026-07-28 clients

Microsoft’s microsoft/mcp-gateway is a data-plane and control-plane layer built around Model Context Protocol servers. It sits in front of MCP servers in Kubernetes and handles per-request routing, bearer-token or RBAC authorization, adapter lifecycle management, and a separate REST API surface for deploying, updating, and removing servers. A tool-router component directs tool calls dynamically across registered tool servers, and the architecture explicitly supports multiple router instances without transport-session affinity — a design choice that favors horizontal scaling over sticky sessions. Who it’s for: teams operating many MCP servers in production who want centralized routing, policy enforcement, and lifecycle automation instead of point-to-point configuration. The control-plane REST endpoints cover CRUD on /adapters and /tools, with status, logs, and deployment hooks, plus metadata persistence for server and tool state. Evidence of readiness is mixed. The stateless-routing model and multi-instance tool router are concrete engineering decisions with clear tradeoffs documented in the README. Telemetry, access control, and observability are surfaced as integration points rather