Give Your Agents Tools That Scale Down to Zero or Up to Infinity Originally shared by Google Cloud Tech on X - August 26, 2026. By @zeroasterisk and @Saboo_Shubham_.
An agent is only as capable as its tools, and in production those tools run as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Every other layer of your stack scales to zero when it goes idle — until last month, a single MCP session pinned every tool call to one container.
Agent Plugins Package Your Skills, Tools, and More Originally published on Google Developers Blog - August 6, 2026
Google has announced Agent Plugins 1.0.0, a new vendor-neutral directory specification backed by major tech companies including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This standard aims to package Agent Skills and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers into portable, interoperable units.
Key Highlights The specification standardizes the manifest (plugin.json) and utilizes a fixed directory layout, eliminating the need for developers to maintain separate wrappers or configurations to support different AI coding agents and IDEs.
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.
A2UI + MCP Apps: Combining the Best of Declarative and Custom Agentic UIs Originally published on Google Developers Blog - June 17, 2026, by the Google A2UI Team, Ido Salomon, and Liad Yosef.
Three architectural patterns show how to combine A2UI’s declarative rendering with MCP Apps’ custom iframe environments, giving developers a way to build secure, performant, and brand-consistent agentic user experiences.
Why This Matters Declarative UI and custom iframe-based UI solve different problems — this piece lays out when to reach for each, and how to combine them.