QCon AI Boston 2026

Session

The MCP Megalith: Surviving the 1,000-Tool Explosion and Auth Fragmentation

June 1–2, 2026 · Boston University

Tuesday Jun 2 / 01:20PM EDT · Terrace Lounge

Speaker

Neil Mansilla

VP of Platform @Barndoor AI

Full speaker profile

Abstract

A year ago, remote MCP servers were largely experimental — alpha builds exposing a handful of tool operations. Today the ecosystem looks very different. Major SaaS and PaaS platforms are shipping first-party MCP servers at scale, with vendors like Datadog and PostHog publishing hundreds of tools in the span of a few months.

The core problem isn't just tool sprawl, it's that every vendor is solving connection management, authentication, and tool discovery slightly differently — and the patterns are diverging faster than the standards can settle. Enterprises consuming these servers inherit that fragmentation directly, and the operational and security implications are only beginning to surface.

This session offers a ground-level view of the current MCP landscape from the vantage point of a gateway operating between large first-party servers and their enterprise consumers. We’ll walk through the OAuth patterns now emerging in production, why previously promoted standards like Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) are being quietly walked back, and how teams are handling state, auth, and routing across inconsistent vendor implementations. The session is grounded in patterns observed across organizations building, consuming, and securing remote MCP servers at scale.

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Barndoor provides fine-grained controls, clear oversight, and contextual boundaries so you can trust every agentic action.