MCP Access Point

Overview

The MCP Access Point is a lightweight gateway that bridges traditional HTTP services and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It allows MCP‑enabled clients—such as Cursor Desktop, VS Code, and other AI assistants—to talk to existing RESTful or SSE‑based APIs without requiring any changes on the server side. By translating MCP requests into standard HTTP calls and streaming responses back in a format understood by the client, it removes the need to build custom MCP adapters for every backend service.

This solution solves a common pain point for developers who want to expose legacy APIs to AI assistants: the lack of native MCP support. Rather than refactoring code or writing new endpoints, teams can deploy the Access Point as a thin proxy. It automatically detects MCP traffic and routes it to the appropriate backend, whether that service is running locally or on a remote host. The gateway supports both stateless Streamable HTTP and Server‑Sent Events (SSE) transports, giving clients flexibility in how they receive data streams.

Key capabilities include:

• Protocol Conversion: Seamlessly maps MCP request/response patterns to HTTP and SSE, preserving streaming semantics.
• Zero‑Intrusive Integration: Operates entirely as a reverse proxy; no modifications to existing APIs are required.
• Multi‑Tenant Support: Each tenant can configure its own endpoints and routing rules, enabling isolated deployments.
• Dynamic Configuration: Runtime updates to routing or protocol settings are possible without restarting the proxy, thanks to an Admin API.
• Lightweight Architecture: Built on Pingora, a high‑performance gateway library that has handled millions of requests per second for Cloudflare, ensuring low latency and high throughput.

In practice, the Access Point is ideal for scenarios such as:

1. Rapid AI‑powered feature rollout – A company can expose a new data analysis API to an internal ChatGPT assistant without redeploying the service.
2. Legacy system integration – Older services that only support HTTP can be instantly made available to modern AI tools, accelerating adoption.
3. Multi‑tenant SaaS platforms – Each customer’s APIs can be exposed to AI assistants on a per‑client basis, all managed through the same gateway.

By acting as an invisible translator between MCP clients and conventional web services, the MCP Access Point empowers developers to harness AI assistants in existing infrastructures with minimal friction and maximum scalability.