IBM ContextForge (MCP Context Forge)
What it is
Open-source registry and proxy that federates MCP servers, A2A agents and REST/gRPC APIs behind one endpoint, with discovery, guardrails/plugins and an admin UI. The GitHub description calls it “an AI Gateway, registry, and proxy”. Position: MCP gateway + registry that also fronts A2A and REST; it also has LLM token/cost metrics but is not primarily a model router.
AI gateway vs MCP gateway: ContextForge’s tagline says “AI Gateway”, yet its core job is tool/agent federation (MCP-side). For model routing and cost control see PortKey or agentgateway.
Maker, licence
Repo IBM/mcp-context-forge in the IBM GitHub organisation; Apache-2.0; about 4,586 stars on 2026-10-08, last push the same day; latest release v1.0.11 (2026-09-28) per GitHub API. The README makes no statement of official IBM support (see Open items). Company: IBM.
Core capabilities (README)
- Federation of MCP servers, REST services and A2A agents (a2a-protocol); REST to MCP tool conversion with JSON Schema extraction; gRPC discovery via reflection.
- Auth: Basic, JWT, custom; user-scoped OAuth tokens; SSO (Google, GitHub, Entra ID mentioned). RBAC referenced only briefly.
- “40+ plugins” (README wording) for transports, protocols and integrations.
- API-gateway features: retries, timeouts, rate limiting, reverse proxy.
- Observability: OpenTelemetry (Phoenix, Jaeger, Zipkin, Tempo and others), Prometheus, LLM token/cost metrics. HTMX/Alpine admin UI.
- Transports: HTTP, JSON-RPC, WebSocket, SSE, Streamable HTTP; stdio for server-side use.
- Deployment: PyPI (
mcp-contextforge-gateway), GHCR images, Docker Compose (PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx), Helm; guides for AWS, Azure, Cloud Run, IBM Cloud Code Engine, OpenShift. Self-hosted only.
MCP spec, maturity
README lets users pick the protocol version (example 2025-11-25); no single revision stated. Latest tag v1.0.11, but the README has no beta/GA label and example tags use 1.0.0-RC-3; arm64 containers are noted as not supported for production.
Fit and limits (opinion)
Broad federation features suit platform teams that self-host and want one registry for MCP, A2A and REST. Verify support terms before production. Related: model-context-protocol, mcp-security-with-gateway, microsoft-mcp-gateway.
Self-learning
- https://github.com/IBM/mcp-context-forge (README)
- Releases: https://github.com/IBM/mcp-context-forge/releases
Sources (fetched 2026-10-08)
- GitHub API repos/IBM/mcp-context-forge and releases/latest; raw README
Open items
- Official IBM support/product status: not stated in the README.
- Exact MCP spec revisions supported and docs site URL: not verified.