Execution plane / Tier 1 / Phase 1
Protocol & Interoperability
How do agents, tools and peers talk?
Standard contracts at every boundary so frameworks stay replaceable: MCP downward to tools and data, A2A sideways to peer agents, OpenAPI and AsyncAPI to the rest of the estate.
- MCP servers and clients for tools, resources and prompts
- A2A agent cards, task lifecycle and artifacts for agent-to-agent work
- OpenAPI and AsyncAPI contracts for conventional services and events
- Registries: which agents, tools and skills exist, at which version, owned by whom
- Version and deprecation policy across protocol revisions
- Supply-chain scanning of third-party servers and skills
orchestration delegates through protocols
tools are exposed as typed contracts
data servers published over MCP
scanning, signing and pinning of servers and skills
registries feed governance and audit
protocol-level spans and correlation
Enterprise Architecture, with Platform Engineering
- Chief or enterprise architect — accountable owner
- Integration architect — boundary contracts and versioning
- API product manager — registry, lifecycle, deprecation
- Security architect — supply chain and protocol threat model
Architectural recommendation, not a research finding.
Adopt MCP in the pilot to avoid rewriting integrations later. A2A federation and a shared agent registry are the phase 3 workstream, once more than one team runs agents that must delegate to each other.
Signals to watch
- Share of integrations on standard contracts rather than bespoke glue
- Schema-break incidents per quarter
- Registry coverage against deployed reality
- Scan findings on third-party servers and skills, and time to remediate
- Tool poisoning, rug-pulls and tool shadowing from third-party servers
- Version skew as the MCP stateless core lands and deprecated features are removed
- Registry sprawl: nobody knows how many agents exist
- Insecure inter-agent communication (OWASP ASI07) once A2A is in play
Tool and standards snapshot · last reviewed approximately mid-2026
Open source
- MCP SDKs across languages
- mcp-scan for server and tool scanning
- MCP gateways and proxies
- A2A SDKs (five languages under the Linux Foundation)
- Agent Skills (SKILL.md) tooling
- OpenAPI and AsyncAPI toolchains
Managed
- Vendor MCP servers for major SaaS systems
- Managed agent registries and catalogues
Standards
- MCP revision 2025-11-25; stateless core 2026-07-28 (Dynamic Client Registration replaced by Client ID Metadata Documents; Roots, Sampling and Logging deprecated)
- A2A v1.0 under the Linux Foundation / AAIF, 150+ organisations
- Agent Skills open standard (SKILL.md), published December 2025
- OpenAPI 3.x and AsyncAPI
Frameworks turn over every few quarters; protocols outlive them. Being protocol-centric rather than framework-centric is the single decision that most reduces future rework.