What is MCP gateway?

An MCP gateway is an aggregation and control layer that fronts multiple MCP servers behind a single connection point. As a team adopts more servers, a code host, a database, a search service, a memory store, pointing every agent and every client at each server individually becomes hard to secure and operate. A gateway consolidates them: the agent connects to one endpoint, and the gateway routes each tool call to the right backend server, often merging their tool lists into one namespace. Because every call flows through it, the gateway is the natural place to enforce authentication and OAuth, apply per-server or per-tool access policies, rate-limit, log and trace usage for observability, and centralize secrets so individual clients never hold backend credentials. Some gateways also translate transports, exposing local stdio servers over remote Streamable HTTP so they can be reached centrally. The trade-off is an extra hop and a component to run, but for multi-server, multi-user deployments a gateway is how teams keep an expanding set of MCP servers governed and discoverable instead of sprawling.