One of the biggest challenges to adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the cold start problem. Most organizations already operate large, well-defined API ecosystems built on REST and GraphQL, yet very few have native MCP servers. Rewriting or duplicating these services is unrealistic and slows down experimentation with agent-based systems.
This session presents patterns and tooling for bridging existing API catalogs into MCP without rewriting backend services. We introduce the “Synthesis Pattern,” an approach for translating OpenAPI and GraphQL into MCP tools and resources. Rather than treating MCP as a replacement layer, this approach treats it as an adaptive interface on top of existing infrastructure.
The talk dives into practical implementation details, including how to map HTTP semantics and schema contracts into MCP tool lifecycles, how to build a context-aware proxy that enriches API calls with semantic metadata for agents, and how to expose large API catalogs safely.
By focusing on open source implementations and extensible reference architectures, this session shows how developers can make MCP immediately useful.