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All issuesVolume 328, Issue 4IT Vendor NewsF5

Context Is The New Perimeter: Governing AI Agents With Programmable Application Delivery

F5, Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

There's a persistent, dangerous myth in AIOps: 'MCP is just another API.' Sure. And SOAP was just XML with delusions of grandeur.

Agent-based architectures, especially those built on Model Context Protocol (MCP), rely on explicit context blocks carried across every request. This isn't about neural hunches or 'LLM memory.' It's serialized, structured, operational context-think JSON, not vibes-passed along with every call to help agents keep track of goals, roles, policies, and workflow state.

But here's the reality: context drifts. And when it does, your agents don't just get confused. They get confidently wrong, operationally unpredictable, or flat-out dangerous.

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