Global Field CTO at solo.io, author 'Istio in Action', 'AI Gateways in the Enterprise' and other books. He is known for being an architect, speaker, blogger and contributor to AI and infrastructure open-source projects.
LinkedIn Twitter Github StackoverflowThis is a bonus post following on from my Understanding MCP Authorization three part series covering building (and understanding) an MCP HTTP based server and implementing the MCP Authorization spec (2025-06-18)....
The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol is emerging as the de-facto standard for how autonomous AI agents talk to each other. While most of the interest around A2A has been around stateful messaging, one of its most po...
This is the final post in a three-part series on MCP Authorization following the June 2025 revisions. In the first two posts, we built an MCP server with the HTTP transport and implemented the right OAuth token h...
In this post (part two of three), we’ll dig into the June 2025 MCP Authorization specification more closely. See Part One for setting up the MCP Server using HTTP Transport.
Creating MCP Servers to connect functionality to LLM applications / AI agents is fairly straight forward. Most of the examples you see, however, are the simple stdio-transport MCP servers. If you wish to build MC...
I’ve been writing a lot recently about Agent identity, how crucial it is in Agentic systems for not only security but monitoring, auditing and causality/attribution as well. But we cannot talk about Agent identit...
At first glance, AI agents seem very similar to microservices when it comes to security and identity. You need to secure the channel and authorize who is calling whom. Communication happens over the network throu...
I’ve been digging into Agent Identity, authentication/authorization patterns, and how it fits in with existing technology patterns (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SPIFFE, etc) and where it may need new solutions. Someone made ...
In earlier posts exploring AI agent and agent identity, Do We Even Need Agent Identity? and Agent Identity: Impersonation or Delegation?, I dug into the identity tradeoffs surrounding AI agents in the enterprise....
In a recent blog post, I discussed whether AI agents need their own identity. I ended with “yes, they do”, but how do we end up doing that? In this blog, we’ll look at a very important concept when it comes to ag...
As API adoption matured in enterprise organizations, a natural pattern emerged and we are seeing something similar in AI agent architectures: using layers to contain complexity. Dealing with team boundaries, busi...
In our recent engineering face-to-face, one of our engineers raised what seemed like a simple question: “Why can’t we just pass the user’s OIDC token through to the agent? Why complicate things with separate agen...
It’s a little after 5p, and I’m about to wrap up for the day. As I’m starting to shut things down, I get a message from my boss:
As organizations start to deploy AI agents in earnest, we are discovering just how easy it is to attack these kind of systems. I went into quite some detail about how “natural language” introduces new attack vect...
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent 2 Agent (A2A) specification are similar RPC style protocols that specify interaction between Agents and Tools (MCP) and Agents and other Agents (A2A). They both focus on...
Continuing on with my series about microservices implementations (see “Why Microservices Should Be Event Driven”, “Three things to make your microservices more resilient”, “Carving the Java EE Monolith: Prefer Ve...
Some of this I cover in my book “Microservices for Java Developers” O’Reilly June 2016 (launching soon!), but I want to give a more specific treatment of it here. I get questions from folks about NetflixOSS (it’s...
One of the advantages of building distributed systems as microservices is the ability of the system as a whole to withstand faults and unexpected failures of components, networks, compute resources, etc. These s...
I just delivered a 4-day deep-dive training course on Docker and Kubernetes to a customer in Atlanta. In true open-source spirit, I’d like to publish the source/slides and allow other people to benefit from it an...
A lot of teams I talk to recently are very interested in “DevOps” (whatever that means… seems to mean different things to different people?) and when we sit down and talk about what that really means, the directi...