Model Context Protocol (MCP) Foundations Lab
Solution overview
Welcome to the "Model Context Protocol (MCP) Foundations Lab", a hands-on lab designed to help you understand and use an open-source standard that's quickly gaining momentum in the world of AI. Whether you're a developer, engineer, or someone curious about how AI systems connect to real tools and data, this lab will walk you through the core concepts of MCP and give you practical skills to build, run, and connect your own MCP servers.
This is a fundamentals-level lab, so we will focus on the core concepts of MCP rather than the full technical specification. The goal is to give you a solid, practical understanding of how MCP works, not to cover every advanced capability or implementation detail.
About MCP
MCP is an open-source standard designed to standardize how LLM applications connect to and work with external tools and data sources. Think of the MCP as the USB standard of the AI world. Before USB existed, every device whether it was printers, cameras, or keyboards, had its own cable or connector. Nothing worked together unless you bought the exact right adapter. It was messy, inconsistent, and frustrating.
MCP solves the same problem for AI agent tool use. Instead of every app, model provider, and developer inventing their own tool-calling mechanism, MCP provides a universal protocol that any model and any tool can use to communicate.