Scaling AI Agent Infrastructure with the MCP Stateless Updates

Originally published on Google Developers Blog - August 5, 2026, co-authored with Kurtis Van Gent.

The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol (MCP) spec removes protocol-level sessions in favor of a stateless core. Every tool call is now self-describing, which unlocks seamless horizontal scaling and lets tool servers run on standard HTTP routing infrastructure — no more sticky sessions, no more Redis clusters just to remember which pod holds a session.

Why This Matters

I co-authored this piece after hitting the session-affinity wall firsthand while deploying MCP servers across Google’s cloud infrastructure — sticky sessions and idle warm pods just to hold onto an Mcp-Session-Id header. The 2026-07-28 spec (SEP-2575 and SEP-2567) deletes that handshake, moves identity into inline _meta, and lets tool containers scale to zero on Cloud Run. This directly shapes how we design agent tool infrastructure — see also the companion breakdown in the X thread linked below.

Read the full article: Scaling AI Agent Infrastructure with the MCP Stateless updates on Google Developers Blog