Wrangling the Wild West of MCP Servers
Cisco, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
It's getting real out here. Ever since I shared how autonomous AI Agents can monitor and heal the network on their own-yes, that one-I've gotten the same follow-up question in different forms: 'Okay, Kareem, this all sounds great. but how do I actually build one of these Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for my product?'
Good news! If your product-like almost every product out there-has APIs, then chances are that you already have what you need.
Enter: OpenAPI spec
OpenAPI is a friendly contract for your APIs. You might've used it for Swagger docs, SDKs, Postman collections, or that one dusty codegen project from 2021. But here's the twist: What if you passed that same OpenAPI spec to your AI agent?
That's it. That's the key.
One OpenAPI spec -> one MCP Server -> one AI-powered, access-controlled gateway to your product.
And no, this isn't a '12 steps and a DevRel miracle' situation. It's just a few lines of Python and a FastMCP wrapper around your OpenAPI file. The magic? Your APIs get transformed into safe, role-based AI tools-without writing a single custom tool definition.