mcp-context-forge vs sam
IBM's registry + proxy federating MCP, A2A and REST/gRPC into one governed endpoint: discovery, auth, rate limits, guardrails, OTel tracing, 40+ plugins — scales to K8s with Redis federation. — versus — Zero-trust P2P mesh for agents, published by Google: libp2p nodes with portable crypto identities self-discover, and an MCP sidecar lets an agent invoke tools on any node — cloud, local or edge.
Two answers to 'how does an agent reach many tool servers': IBM's forge federates MCP/A2A/REST behind one governed central endpoint; SAM removes the center, giving every node an authenticated identity on a self-healing P2P mesh.
| mcp-context-forge | sam | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 4.4k | 643 |
| Forks | 832 | 95 |
| Language | Python | Go |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | 3 days ago | today |
| Topics | gateway | agents, gateway, security |
| Curated connections | 3 | 3 |
mcp-context-forge — the curator's take
The enterprise answer for the TOOL plane: where model gateways govern LLM calls, ContextForge governs MCP servers, A2A agents and legacy REST — wrapping the lot as one compliant MCP endpoint with RBAC and tracing. When NOT: a laptop with three MCP servers — this is platform infrastructure (Postgres, Redis, K8s) with real ops weight, and the 0.x release train moves fast enough that upgrades need reading the notes.
sam — the curator's take
The bet here is transport, not agents. Portable cryptographic identity plus libp2p routing means an agent's tools stay reachable when it moves between laptop, cluster and edge, and every node, connection and packet is authenticated instead of trusted for being inside the VPC — plus a public testnet you can join in minutes and a `sam-mesh` skill that puts an agent on the mesh in one line. Costs: you operate a control plane, routers and per-host nodes, and Go/Kubernetes fluency is assumed. Read the disclaimer too — published by Google, but not an officially supported Google product and outside its vulnerability reward program. If your agents all live in one cluster and call a handful of MCP servers, a gateway is far less machinery.