MCP

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems.

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The Model Context Protocol includes the following projects:

• MCP Specification: A specification of MCP that outlines the implementation requirements for clients and servers.

• MCP SDKs: SDKs for different programming languages that implement MCP.

• MCP Development Tools: Tools for developing MCP servers and clients, including the MCP Inspector

• MCP Reference Server Implementations: Reference implementations of MCP servers.

The key participants in the MCP architecture are:

• MCP Host: The AI application that coordinates and manages one or multiple MCP clients

• MCP Client: A component that maintains a connection to an MCP server and obtains context from an MCP server for the MCP host to use

• MCP Server: A program that provides context to MCP clients

For example: Visual Studio Code acts as an MCP host. When Visual Studio Code establishes a connection to an MCP server, such as the Sentry MCP server, the Visual Studio Code runtime instantiates an MCP client object that maintains the connection to the Sentry MCP server. When Visual Studio Code subsequently connects to another MCP server, such as the local filesystem server, the Visual Studio Code runtime instantiates an additional MCP client object to maintain this connection, hence maintaining a one-to-one relationship of MCP clients to MCP servers.

Note that MCP server refers to the program that serves context data, regardless of where it runs. MCP servers can execute locally or remotely. For example, when Claude Desktop launches the filesystem server, the server runs locally on the same machine because it uses the STDIO transport. This is commonly referred to as a “local” MCP server. The official Sentry MCP server runs on the Sentry platform, and uses the Streamable HTTP transport. This is commonly referred to as a “remote” MCP server.