import Link from 'next/link';
import { ArrowLeft, Calendar, Clock } from 'lucide-react';

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  title: "MCP Gateway Guide: From Routing to Economic Governance",
  description: "A complete MCP gateway guide covering architecture, auth, tool aggregation, and budget enforcement for AI agent tool calls.",
  alternates: { canonical: 'https://satgate.io/blog/mcp-gateway-guide' },
  keywords: ['MCP gateway guide', 'MCP gateway', 'Model Context Protocol gateway', 'MCP proxy', 'MCP server gateway', 'MCP budget enforcement', 'MCP gateway setup'],
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    title: 'MCP Gateway Guide: From Routing to Economic Governance',
    description: 'A practical MCP gateway guide for routing, auth, tool aggregation, observability, and request-path budget enforcement.',
    url: 'https://satgate.io/blog/mcp-gateway-guide',
    type: 'article',
    publishedTime: '2026-03-24T00:00:00Z',
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  twitter: {
    card: 'summary_large_image',
    title: 'MCP Gateway Guide: From Routing to Economic Governance',
    description: 'Learn why MCP gateways need more than routing: per-tool budgets, revocation, delegation, and audit controls.',
  },
};

export default function McpGatewayGuideBlogPage() {
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    '@type': 'TechArticle',
    headline: 'MCP Gateway Guide: From Traffic Routing to Economic Governance',
    description: 'A complete MCP gateway guide covering architecture, authentication, tool aggregation, observability, and request-path budget enforcement for AI agent tool calls.',
    url: 'https://satgate.io/blog/mcp-gateway-guide',
    datePublished: '2026-03-24',
    dateModified: '2026-05-04',
    author: { '@type': 'Organization', name: 'SatGate' },
    publisher: { '@type': 'Organization', name: 'SatGate', url: 'https://satgate.io' },
    about: [
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'MCP gateway' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'MCP budget enforcement' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'economic governance for AI agents' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'request-path policy enforcement' },
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        name: 'What is an MCP gateway?',
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          text: 'An MCP gateway sits between AI agents and MCP servers to centralize routing, authentication, tool discovery, policy enforcement, observability, and economic governance for tool calls.',
        },
      },
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'Why does an MCP gateway need budget enforcement?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'MCP tools can trigger paid APIs, model calls, database queries, or external services. Budget enforcement stops runaway loops and tool fanout before expensive calls execute, instead of reporting the spend after the fact.',
        },
      },
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'How is an economic MCP gateway different from a routing gateway?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'A routing gateway connects agents to tools. An economic MCP gateway also applies per-agent, per-tool, per-workflow budgets, revocation, delegation, and audit controls in the request path.',
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  return (
    <div className="min-h-screen bg-black text-gray-100 font-sans">
      <script type="application/ld+json" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(articleJsonLd) }} />
      <script type="application/ld+json" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(faqJsonLd) }} />
      <div className="max-w-3xl mx-auto px-6 py-16">
        <Link href="/blog" className="text-gray-500 hover:text-white flex items-center gap-2 transition mb-8">
          <ArrowLeft size={18} /> Back to Blog
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        <header className="mb-12">
          <div className="flex flex-wrap gap-2 mb-4">
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-purple-900/30 border border-purple-500/30 text-purple-300 text-xs font-mono">MCP</span>
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-cyan-900/30 border border-cyan-500/30 text-cyan-300 text-xs font-mono">Gateway</span>
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-yellow-900/30 border border-yellow-500/30 text-yellow-300 text-xs font-mono">Guide</span>
          </div>
          
          <h1 className="text-4xl font-bold mb-4">MCP Gateway Guide: From Traffic Routing to Economic Governance</h1>
          
          <p className="text-xl text-gray-400 mb-6 italic">
            Every MCP gateway guide stops at routing and auth. Here's what comes after — and why it determines whether your agents stay under budget or burn through it.
          </p>
          
          <div className="flex items-center gap-4 text-sm text-gray-500">
            <span className="flex items-center gap-1"><Calendar size={14} /> March 24, 2026</span>
            <span className="flex items-center gap-1"><Clock size={14} /> 11 min read</span>
          </div>
        </header>

        <article className="prose prose-invert prose-lg max-w-none">
          
          <p className="text-gray-300 text-lg leading-relaxed">
            The Model Context Protocol (MCP) changed how AI agents interact with tools. Instead of every agent team building custom integrations for Slack, GitHub, databases, and APIs, MCP provides a standard interface: agents speak MCP, tools expose MCP servers, and everyone connects.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Then reality set in. One agent connecting to one MCP server is a demo. Fifty agents connecting to twenty MCP servers across five teams is production. And production needs a gateway.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            There's no shortage of MCP gateway guides out there — Docker, Traefik, Composio, and others have published their takes. They cover the fundamentals well: centralized routing, auth translation, tool aggregation. But they all stop at the same point: getting traffic from agents to tools.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            This guide goes further. We'll cover the standard gateway architecture, then address the layer that determines whether your MCP deployment stays financially viable: <strong className="text-white">economic governance</strong>.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">What Is an MCP Gateway?</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            An MCP gateway sits between AI agents and MCP servers. Instead of each agent maintaining direct connections to every tool server, agents connect to the gateway, and the gateway manages upstream connections.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Without a gateway:
Agent A → MCP Server (GitHub)
Agent A → MCP Server (Slack)
Agent A → MCP Server (Database)
Agent B → MCP Server (GitHub)
Agent B → MCP Server (Slack)
Agent B → MCP Server (Database)
# 6 connections, each configured separately

# With a gateway:
Agent A → MCP Gateway → MCP Server (GitHub)
Agent B → MCP Gateway → MCP Server (Slack)
                       → MCP Server (Database)
# 2 agent connections, gateway manages the rest`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            This centralization solves three immediate problems:
          </p>

          <ul className="text-gray-300 space-y-2">
            <li><strong className="text-white">Configuration sprawl.</strong> Without a gateway, each agent needs credentials and connection details for every tool. With a gateway, agents authenticate once.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Auth translation.</strong> MCP servers often need specific credentials (OAuth tokens, API keys, service accounts). The gateway handles credential management so agents don't carry sensitive tokens.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Tool discovery.</strong> The gateway aggregates tool definitions from all upstream servers, presenting agents with a unified catalog of available capabilities.</li>
          </ul>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            If you've worked with API gateways (Kong, Envoy, Traefik), MCP gateways serve an analogous role for the MCP protocol. The difference is what flows through them: not HTTP requests, but tool calls with structured inputs and outputs.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">MCP Gateway Architecture: The Standard Stack</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Most MCP gateway implementations share a common architecture with four layers:
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Layer 1: Transport</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            MCP supports multiple transports: stdio (local processes), SSE (Server-Sent Events over HTTP), and the newer Streamable HTTP transport. A gateway typically accepts connections via SSE or Streamable HTTP on the client side, and connects to upstream servers using whatever transport they support.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Gateway transport configuration
gateway:
  listen:
    transport: streamable-http
    port: 8080
    path: /mcp
  upstreams:
    - name: github
      transport: stdio
      command: "npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-github"
    - name: database
      transport: sse
      url: "https://internal.corp/mcp/database"
    - name: slack
      transport: streamable-http
      url: "https://internal.corp/mcp/slack"`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Transport bridging is table stakes. Every gateway handles this. The key decision is which client-facing transport to expose — Streamable HTTP is the recommended choice for new deployments, with SSE as a fallback for older clients.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Layer 2: Authentication & Authorization</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The gateway becomes your authentication boundary. Agents authenticate to the gateway; the gateway authenticates to upstream servers. This is where most guides spend their time, and for good reason — getting auth wrong means either agents can't connect or agents can access everything.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Standard auth: API keys or OAuth
gateway:
  auth:
    type: bearer
    validate: https://auth.corp/validate
  
  # Per-upstream credentials (managed by gateway)
  upstreams:
    github:
      auth:
        type: token
        secret: GITHUB_PAT  # From vault
    database:
      auth:
        type: service-account
        credentials: /etc/creds/db.json`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Standard auth answers one question: <em>is this agent allowed to connect?</em> Binary. Yes or no. We'll come back to why this isn't sufficient.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Layer 3: Tool Aggregation & Filtering</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            When an agent connects to the gateway, it calls <code>tools/list</code> to discover available tools. The gateway aggregates tool definitions from all upstream servers, optionally filtering based on the agent's role or permissions.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Tool filtering by agent role
policies:
  research-agent:
    allowed_tools:
      - github.search_code
      - github.get_file
      - database.query    # read-only
    denied_tools:
      - github.create_issue
      - database.execute  # no writes
  
  admin-agent:
    allowed_tools: ["*"]  # full access`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Tool filtering prevents agents from seeing or calling tools they shouldn't access. It's the authorization complement to authentication — determining not just <em>who can connect</em> but <em>what they can do</em>.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Layer 4: Observability</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The gateway is the natural place to instrument MCP traffic. Every tool call passes through it, so you get a complete audit log without modifying agents or servers.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Structured log entry for every tool call
{
  "timestamp": "2026-03-24T14:00:00Z",
  "agent_id": "research-agent-v3",
  "tool": "github.search_code",
  "input": {"query": "authentication handler", "repo": "org/api"},
  "duration_ms": 342,
  "status": "success",
  "tokens_used": 1250
}`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Structured logging, metrics export (Prometheus, DataDog), and trace correlation are standard gateway capabilities. They tell you <em>what happened</em>. Which brings us to the gap.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">The Gap: What Standard MCP Gateways Miss</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            If you follow Docker's MCP gateway guide, or Traefik's, or Composio's, you'll end up with a working gateway that routes traffic, handles auth, aggregates tools, and logs everything. That's genuinely useful.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            It's also incomplete in a way that won't be obvious until the first cost incident.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Here's the scenario: A research agent connects to your MCP gateway. It has access to a code search tool (fast, cheap) and a code analysis tool (slow, expensive — it invokes an LLM under the hood). The agent is tasked with reviewing a large codebase. It calls the analysis tool 800 times in two hours.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Your gateway logged every call. Your metrics show a spike. Your alert fires. But the damage is done — $2,400 in compute costs, triggered by a single agent with a poorly constrained objective.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The standard gateway stack had four opportunities to prevent this. It used zero of them:
          </p>

          <ul className="text-gray-300 space-y-3">
            <li><strong className="text-white">Authentication</strong> confirmed the agent was valid. It didn't check whether the agent could <em>afford</em> 800 expensive tool calls.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Authorization</strong> confirmed the agent was allowed to use the analysis tool. It didn't limit <em>how much</em> the agent could spend on it.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Observability</strong> recorded every call. It didn't <em>stop</em> any of them.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Rate limiting</strong> (if configured) counted requests per window. It didn't know that some requests cost $0.01 and others cost $3.00.</li>
          </ul>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            This is the economic governance gap. It's not a hypothetical — it's the reason teams who deploy MCP at scale inevitably add a cost control layer, either proactively or after the first surprise bill.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Layer 5: Economic Governance</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Economic governance adds three capabilities to your MCP gateway that the standard four layers don't provide:
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">1. Per-Tool Cost Modeling</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Every tool in your MCP catalog has an economic weight. A <code>search_code</code> call that hits a local index costs virtually nothing. A <code>generate_analysis</code> call that invokes Claude costs real money. The gateway needs to know the difference.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Cost model for MCP tools
tools:
  github.search_code:
    cost: 1 credit       # ~$0.001
  github.get_file:
    cost: 1 credit
  analysis.review_code:
    cost: 50 credits     # ~$0.50 (invokes LLM)
  analysis.generate_report:
    cost: 200 credits    # ~$2.00 (long-form generation)
  database.query:
    cost: 2 credits
  slack.send_message:
    cost: 1 credit`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            With cost modeling, rate limiting becomes budget limiting. An agent with 500 credits can make 500 searches, or 10 code reviews, or 2 report generations. The agent allocates. The gateway enforces.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">2. Budget-Aware Tokens</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Standard bearer tokens say "this agent is authenticated." Budget-aware tokens say "this agent is authenticated <em>and</em> has 1,000 credits remaining." The token itself carries the economic context.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            SatGate implements this with <strong className="text-white">macaroon tokens</strong> — a cryptographic credential format designed at Google that supports embedded caveats. A macaroon can encode:
          </p>

          <ul className="text-gray-300 space-y-2">
            <li>Total budget allocation</li>
            <li>Expiration time</li>
            <li>Allowed tools (or tool categories)</li>
            <li>Delegation chain (which parent minted this token)</li>
          </ul>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Mint a budget-aware token for an agent
satgate mint \\
  --budget 1000 \\
  --holder "research-agent" \\
  --tools "github.search_code,github.get_file,analysis.review_code" \\
  --expires 24h

# The resulting macaroon encodes all constraints
# No server-side session needed — it's self-contained
# The gateway validates the token on every tool call`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The critical property: macaroons support <strong className="text-white">attenuation</strong>. A parent token can mint child tokens with <em>fewer</em> permissions, never more. An orchestrator with 10,000 credits can delegate 2,000 to a research sub-agent. That sub-agent can delegate 500 to a search specialist. The total never exceeds the parent. Authority flows downward and diminishes — exactly the pattern multi-agent architectures need.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">3. Pre-Call Enforcement</h3>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            This is the distinction between observability and governance. Observability logs a tool call after it happens. Governance decides whether the call happens at all.
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Gateway decision flow for each tool call:
1. Agent calls tools/call with macaroon token
2. Gateway validates macaroon signature ✓
3. Gateway checks: is this tool allowed? ✓
4. Gateway looks up tool cost: 50 credits
5. Gateway checks remaining budget: 30 credits
6. 30 < 50 → DENY

# Response to agent:
{
  "error": "budget_exhausted",
  "required": 50,
  "remaining": 30,
  "alternatives": [
    {"tool": "github.search_code", "cost": 1}
  ],
  "topup_url": "https://gateway.corp/budget/request"
}`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The denial is <em>structured</em>. The agent gets machine-readable context: how much it has, how much it needs, and what cheaper alternatives exist. A well-designed agent can adapt — switch to a cheaper tool, request more budget from its parent, or gracefully inform the user. Compare this to a rate-limit 429, which just says "try again later" and triggers a retry loop.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Setting Up an MCP Gateway with Economic Governance</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Here's a practical setup that combines the standard gateway stack with SatGate's economic governance layer.
          </p>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Step 1: Define Your Tool Catalog</h3>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# catalog.yaml — your MCP server inventory
servers:
  github:
    command: "npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-github"
    env:
      GITHUB_TOKEN: \${GITHUB_PAT}
    costs:
      search_code: 1
      get_file: 1
      create_issue: 5
      create_pull_request: 10

  postgres:
    url: "https://mcp.internal/postgres"
    costs:
      query: 2
      execute: 10

  slack:
    command: "npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-slack"
    env:
      SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: \${SLACK_TOKEN}
    costs:
      send_message: 1
      search_messages: 3`}</code>
          </pre>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Step 2: Configure Governance Policies</h3>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# policies.yaml — who can do what, and how much
teams:
  engineering:
    daily_budget: 10000
    agents:
      code-review-agent:
        budget: 3000
        tools: [github.*, postgres.query]
      deploy-agent:
        budget: 1000
        tools: [github.create_pull_request, slack.send_message]

  research:
    daily_budget: 5000
    agents:
      research-agent:
        budget: 5000
        tools: ["*"]  # all tools
        
alerts:
  - threshold: 80%
    notify: [slack:#platform-alerts]
  - threshold: 95%
    notify: [slack:#platform-alerts, pagerduty]`}</code>
          </pre>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Step 3: Start the Gateway</h3>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Install SatGate
go install github.com/satgate-io/satgate/cmd/satgate-mcp@latest

# Start with your catalog and policies
satgate-mcp serve \\
  --catalog catalog.yaml \\
  --policies policies.yaml \\
  --port 8080

# Mint tokens for your agents
satgate-mcp mint \\
  --team engineering \\
  --agent code-review-agent \\
  --budget 3000 \\
  --expires 24h`}</code>
          </pre>

          <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mt-8 mb-3">Step 4: Point Agents at the Gateway</h3>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# In your agent's MCP client config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gateway": {
      "url": "https://gateway.corp:8080/mcp",
      "transport": "streamable-http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <macaroon_token>"
      }
    }
  }
}`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The agent connects to one endpoint instead of multiple servers. The gateway handles routing, auth translation, tool aggregation, and budget enforcement. The agent doesn't need to know about any of this — it just makes tool calls, and the gateway either allows or denies them.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Gateway Comparison: Routing vs. Governance</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Not all MCP gateways are built for the same job. Here's where the current landscape stands:
          </p>

          <div className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-6 my-6 overflow-x-auto">
            <div className="space-y-4 text-sm">
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 font-bold text-white border-b border-gray-700 pb-2">
                <span>Capability</span>
                <span>Routing Gateways</span>
                <span>Economic Gateway</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Transport bridging</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Auth translation</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Tool aggregation</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Request logging</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Per-tool cost modeling</span>
                <span className="text-red-400">✗</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Budget enforcement</span>
                <span className="text-red-400">✗</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Hierarchical delegation</span>
                <span className="text-red-400">✗</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Cost attribution</span>
                <span className="text-red-400">✗</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
              <div className="grid grid-cols-3 gap-4 text-gray-300">
                <span>Structured denial (402)</span>
                <span className="text-red-400">✗</span>
                <span className="text-green-400">✓</span>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Docker's MCP gateway, Traefik Hub's MCP gateway, and Composio's gateway handle the top four rows well. They're solid routing infrastructure. But routing without economics is like a firewall without deny rules — it organizes traffic without controlling what matters.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Multi-Agent Delegation Through the Gateway</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The gateway pattern becomes especially powerful in multi-agent architectures. Consider an orchestrator that coordinates three specialist agents:
          </p>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg p-4 overflow-x-auto text-sm my-6">
            <code className="text-green-300">{`# Orchestrator has 10,000 credits
# It mints sub-tokens for each specialist

Orchestrator (10,000 credits)
├── Research Agent (3,000 credits)
│   └── tools: search_code, get_file, query
├── Analysis Agent (5,000 credits)
│   └── tools: review_code, generate_report
└── Communication Agent (1,000 credits)
    └── tools: send_message, create_issue

# Total delegated: 9,000 ≤ 10,000 ✓
# Each sub-token is cryptographically derived
# Gateway enforces each agent's ceiling independently
# Full Evidence Pack traces back to orchestrator`}</code>
          </pre>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Without economic delegation, multi-agent systems have two bad options: shared credentials (no attribution, no individual limits) or separate credentials (no relationship between them, orchestrator can't control downstream spend). Macaroon-based delegation gives you the third option: hierarchical authority with diminishing permissions at each level.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Production Considerations</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Before deploying an MCP gateway in production, address these operational concerns:
          </p>

          <ul className="text-gray-300 space-y-3">
            <li><strong className="text-white">Latency budget.</strong> The gateway adds a hop. For stdio-backed servers, the gateway process also manages server lifecycles. Measure per-call overhead and set latency budgets for each tool. Economic checks (macaroon validation, budget lookup) add sub-millisecond overhead — they're cryptographic operations, not database queries.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">High availability.</strong> The gateway is a single point of failure. Run at least two instances behind a load balancer. For budget state, use a shared store (Redis) or a consensus-based approach. SatGate's macaroon approach minimizes shared state requirements since the token itself carries the constraints.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Server lifecycle management.</strong> Stdio-based MCP servers are processes that the gateway spawns and manages. Monitor for server crashes, implement restart policies, and set resource limits (memory, CPU) per server process.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Graceful degradation.</strong> If an upstream MCP server is down, the gateway should remove its tools from the catalog rather than returning errors for every call. Agents adapt to available tools; they don't handle transient server failures well.</li>
          </ul>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">The MCP Gateway Maturity Model</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Think of MCP gateway deployment as a progression:
          </p>

          <ol className="text-gray-300 space-y-3">
            <li><strong className="text-white">Level 0: Direct connections.</strong> Each agent connects to each server. Works for prototypes. Doesn't scale.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Level 1: Routing gateway.</strong> Centralized connections, auth translation, tool aggregation. This is where most guides end.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Level 2: Observable gateway.</strong> Add structured logging, metrics, and alerting. You know what happened. You can't prevent it.</li>
            <li><strong className="text-white">Level 3: Governed gateway.</strong> Add cost modeling, budget enforcement, and hierarchical delegation. You control what happens, in real time, before the cost is incurred.</li>
          </ol>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Most teams in early 2026 are at Level 1 or 2. The cost incidents that push them to Level 3 are predictable and preventable — if you build the economic layer from the start rather than bolting it on after the first surprise bill.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold text-white mt-12 mb-4">Getting Started</h2>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            If you're deploying MCP in production, start with whichever routing gateway fits your infrastructure — Docker's gateway for container-heavy environments, Traefik Hub if you're already a Traefik shop, or a custom solution if you need specific transport handling.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Then ask the economic question: <em>when one of our agents burns 10x the expected tool calls, what stops it?</em> If the answer is "an alert that fires after the fact," you're at Level 2. That's fine for dev. It's a risk in production.
          </p>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            Economic governance isn't about distrust — it's about enabling autonomy safely. Agents with clear budget boundaries can operate more independently, because the organization knows the blast radius is contained. The gateway doesn't slow agents down. It lets you give them a longer leash.
          </p>

          <section className="not-prose mt-16 rounded-2xl border border-gray-800 bg-gray-950 p-8">
            <p className="mb-2 text-sm font-mono uppercase tracking-wide text-cyan-300">FAQ</p>
            <h2 className="mb-6 text-2xl font-bold text-white">MCP gateway questions</h2>
            <div className="space-y-5">
              {[
                ['What is an MCP gateway?', 'An MCP gateway sits between AI agents and MCP servers to centralize routing, authentication, tool discovery, policy enforcement, observability, and economic governance for tool calls.'],
                ['Why does an MCP gateway need budget enforcement?', 'MCP tools can trigger paid APIs, model calls, database queries, or external services. Budget enforcement stops runaway loops and tool fanout before expensive calls execute, instead of reporting the spend after the fact.'],
                ['How is an economic MCP gateway different from a routing gateway?', 'A routing gateway connects agents to tools. An economic MCP gateway also applies per-agent, per-tool, per-workflow budgets, revocation, delegation, and audit controls in the request path.'],
              ].map(([question, answer]) => (
                <div key={question} className="border-t border-gray-800 pt-5 first:border-t-0 first:pt-0">
                  <h3 className="mb-2 text-lg font-bold text-white">{question}</h3>
                  <p className="leading-relaxed text-gray-400">{answer}</p>
                </div>
              ))}
            </div>
          </section>

          <div className="mt-12 p-6 bg-gray-900/50 border border-gray-800 rounded-lg">
            <p className="text-gray-300 mb-4">
              SatGate adds economic governance to your MCP gateway. Open source, deploys in minutes:
            </p>
            <pre className="bg-gray-900/70 rounded p-3 text-sm overflow-x-auto">
              <code className="text-green-300">{`go install github.com/satgate-io/satgate/cmd/satgate-mcp@latest`}</code>
            </pre>
            <p className="text-gray-400 text-sm mt-3">
              <a href="https://github.com/SatGate-io/satgate" className="text-cyan-400 hover:text-cyan-300">GitHub →</a>
              {' · '}
              <a href="https://satgate.io/blog/mcp-budget-enforcement-guide" className="text-cyan-400 hover:text-cyan-300">MCP Budget Enforcement Guide →</a>
              {' · '}
              <a href="https://satgate.io/pricing" className="text-cyan-400 hover:text-cyan-300">Enterprise →</a>
            </p>
          </div>

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