Developing AI agents using MCP, A2A, and ACP

1. Fundamentals and Protocol Overview

• Challenges in tool integration and agent interoperability.
• Overview of MCP, A2A, and ACP.
• Application scenarios: tool integration, delegation, multi-agent systems.

2. MCP Design and Tool Contracts

• Role model: Host, Client, Server.
• Design of interfaces and data structures.
• Definition of inputs, outputs, and error cases.
• Development of robust and validatable contracts.

3. Implement the MCP server

• Structure and Architecture of an MCP Server.
• Tool registry and integration of functions.
• Validation, timeouts, and edge cases.
• Development of the first tools and services.

4. Integration into applications and workflows

• Tool discovery and function invocation.
• Processing structured results.
• Reliability through retries, rate limits, and logging.
• Establishing stable integration flows.

5. Security and Governance

• Trust boundaries and data classification.
• Authentication and Authorization (Least Privilege).
• Protection against prompt injection and misuse.
• Auditability and traceability.

6. Agent Communication with A2A

• Roles and division of responsibilities among agents.
• Communication patterns: Request, Status, Result.
• Task management and delegation.
• Handling long-running processes.

7. ACP and API Design for Agents

• Design of Capability APIs.
• Job lifecycle and state models.
• Error Handling Strategies and Idempotence.
• Mapping to agent communication.

8. Reference Architecture for Agent Systems

• Interaction between MCP, A2A, and ACP.
• Architecture of agent mesh systems.
• Versioning, compatibility, and testing.
• Governance, Policies, and Logging.

9. Developing Multi-Agent Systems (Capstone)

• Development of an end-to-end agent system.
• A combination of tools, agents, and workflows.
• Quality assurance, review, and documentation.

10. Production Readiness and Operations

• Requirements for production-ready systems.
• Monitoring, incident handling, and operations.
• Governance processes and rollout strategies.