Enterprise MCP Architecture
Enterprise MCP architecture is the layered design that lets many AI clients use many MCP servers safely at scale. The shape is consistent: AI clients connect to a central MCP gateway, which fronts the upstream MCP servers and applies identity, policy and auditing in between — so control lives in one governed layer rather than in each client or server.
The request path
At the core is a simple three-tier flow:
AI clients → MCP gateway → upstream MCP servers.
Clients (IDE assistants, chat apps, agents) never talk to upstream servers directly. They connect to the gateway over an MCP transport — Streamable HTTP or SSE for remote clients, stdio for local ones — and the gateway parses the JSON-RPC 2.0 traffic, decides what is allowed, and forwards permitted calls to the right server. Upstreams expose tools, resources and prompts; the gateway imports these into a single registry so clients see one coherent catalog instead of a sprawl of endpoints.
The identity plane
Every request must be tied to a real principal. The identity plane connects the gateway to corporate SSO — SAML or OAuth2/OIDC — and provisions users and groups via SCIM 2.0. On top of that sits RBAC: users belong to teams, and each team is granted access to specific MCP servers and specific tools. The result is that "who can call this tool" is answered by the same directory that governs the rest of the enterprise, not by ad-hoc config on individual servers. See MCP Authentication and MCP Authorization.
The policy and governance plane
Authorization decides whether a call proceeds; the governance plane decides how. Because the gateway understands MCP semantics, it can inspect and transform traffic in flight:
- Redaction of secrets and PII from tool arguments and results before they cross a boundary.
- Prompt-injection guarding on untrusted content flowing back to the model.
- Tool-definition integrity checks that catch silently changed tool schemas — the tool-poisoning and rug-pull supply-chain risk.
- Usage quotas and cost budgets so a runaway agent can't exhaust an upstream.
Where duties must be separated, SoD / maker-checker approvals gate sensitive changes. See MCP Governance.
The audit plane
Everything the gateway does is recorded. A tamper-evident audit trail captures which principal invoked which tool, with which arguments, against which server, and what came back — the granularity that regulated environments require and that a plain HTTP log cannot provide. Centralizing audit at the gateway means one consistent record instead of fragments scattered across servers. See MCP Observability & Auditing.
High availability and the data boundary
For production, the gateway runs as multiple stateless replicas behind a load balancer, backed by a replicated datastore, so no single node is a point of failure; disaster-recovery planning covers backup and restore of that state. Equally important is the data boundary: a self-hosted gateway keeps model-to-tool traffic inside your network, so sensitive arguments and results never egress to a third party. That boundary is often the deciding factor for regulated industries.
How Kravn fits
Kravn implements this reference architecture as a single self-hostable component: a gateway, registry and proxy with SSO/SCIM identity, per-team and per-tool entitlements, governance pipelines and tamper-evident audit — deployable via one-command Docker Compose or Helm, with no data egress. See What is Kravn and Enterprise-relevant concepts.