MCP Academy PNW 2025

On October 29, 2025, a group of ~200 developers gathered near Seattle, WA for a full-day of practical guidance on putting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) into production. Speakers from Microsoft, Databricks, AWS and more shared MCP use cases and demos. All recordings from the event are included in this learning path.

Intermediate

14 lessons

Approx. 3 hrs 44 min

Instructors

Dan Barr

Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

Dan is a Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer at Stacklok, where he helps developers understand how to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to multiply the value of their AI coding assistants.

Intermediate

14 lessons

Approx. 3 hrs 44 min

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What you’ll learn

MCP Academy PNW was a full-day gathering for 200 engineering leaders and developers that want to put AI agents to work. This community event featured MCP use cases and demos from core maintainers, early adopters and enterprises.

Lessons

Lesson 1

Reduce Token Waste with an Intelligent MCP Proxy

As you install MCP servers, the risk is that you start crowding your context window with all the tool metadata tied to those servers. While a few tools may be needed for a task, most of the metadata simply wastes tokens and risks degrading model performance. Craig McLuckie of Stacklok launched a simple solution to …

Video

14 min

Lesson 2

Building a Multi-tenant MCP Gateway on AgentCore Gateway

Nick Aldridge of AWS is one of the core maintainers of the Model Context Protocol. He joined MCP Academy to talk about the architecture of a multi-tenant MCP gateway, and then showed the audience exactly how to bring it to life with AgentCore Gateway.

Video

8 min

Lesson 3

Safe and Deterministic Browser Automation with WebMCP

There has been a lot of recent buzz about browser agents like ChatGPT ‘Atlas’ and Perplexity ‘Comet’ but there are very real security concerns with how they work today. Alex Nahas who created MCP-B highlight some of those concerns and then showed how WebMCP could be a mitigating force.

Video

10 min

Lesson 4

Signal vs. Noise in the MCP Ecosystem

In the first half of 2025, Baxter Black from Madrona co-authored a post that broke down patterns and popularity in the MCP ecosystem. Just in time for MCP Academy, Baxter revisited the research to highlight which MCP servers are being used most widely and hinted at the likely use cases driving enterprise interest in MCP.

Video

20 min

Lesson 5

Use an MCP Server to Ship your AI Code with Control and Visibility

With increasing use of AI coding assistants there’s growing pressure on developers to maintain control and visibility of their code. Brock Lumbard from Statsig offered some guidance and then jumped into a demo that resonated with the developers in the audience.

Video

19 min

Lesson 6

Helpful tools to build MCP Servers

Early at MCP Academy, Caitie McCaffrey of Microsoft took the stage to demo simple, effective ways to build your next MCP server. Whether you’re just starting your MCP journey, or you’ve already built a number of MCP servers, Caitie’s talk has you covered.

Video

16 min

Lesson 7

Making API Catalogs AI native with MCP

Most enterprises maintain API catalogs with documentation, specs, reference guides and more that is designed for human consumption. What happens when developers need their AI copilots to discover, understand and interact with APIs? Ross Kukulinski from Kong showed us how to use MCP servers to enable AI agents to conversationally explore available APIs.

Video

17 min

Lesson 8

Putting MCP into Context: What it is and Why it Matters

The first session at MCP Academy was an important opportunity to get the entire audience aligned on a definition of the protocol and its potential. Eleftheria Stein-Kousathana from Stacklok set the tone with a clear outline of the Model Context Protocol.

Video

14 min

Lesson 9

Building MCP Ecosystems that Connect to Governed Data

There’s a joke that the ‘S’ in MCP stands for security. Working out how to build the right security controls is a critical obstacle for many production deployments. Jai Behl and Satish Sheth from Databricks share ideas and examples that make it real.

Video

24 min

Lesson 10

Overcoming MCP Deployment Hurdles with Standardized Solutions

A lot of enterprises are experimenting with MCP, while a brave through are putting it into production. Harish Gaggar shares how Credit Karma constructed the necessary connectors and security guardrails to apply MCP in a regulated industry.

Video

22 min

Lesson 11

Building a Virtual MCP Server to Unlock New Tool Groupings

The MCP spec calls for a 1-to-1 relationship between client and server; however, there are situations where you need multiple tools from multiple MCP servers to complete a task. Dave Dixon from Credit Karma is pushing for a solution.

Video

9 min

Lesson 12

Exploring Observability with MCP Servers

One of the hot button topics when it comes to MCP is observability. Sure, MCP can introduce new observability challenges, but it might also be able to resolve some long-standing observability issues. One of the more popular MCP servers is from Grafana, and Tiffany Jernigan showed the audience how to put it to work.

Video

17 min

Lesson 13

Using MCP to Bridge AI Agents and Cloud Infrastructure

We spent a lot of the MCP Academy day focused on how MCP can help produce better apps. Adam Bell and Artur Laksberg from Pulumi shared a different use case, deploying and operating cloud infrastructure. Learn how MCP can help an agent upgrade runtimes, analyze dependencies and more.

Video

23 min

Lesson 14

Developer-First Feature Management with MCP

If you want to put MCP servers to work, it’s helpful to understand how it can fit into your daily workflow. So, Alexander Lawrence from LaunchDarkly showed the audiencehow to use MCP servers to manage feature flags.

Video

11 min