Context: Why Gateway MCP Support Matters

Tyk announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) support in their 5.7 release, positioning the gateway as a unified entry point for both traditional REST APIs and AI model interactions. For teams running multi-provider LLM architectures—where OpenAI, Anthropic, and self-hosted endpoints coexist—this means centralizing rate limits, auth, and failover logic at the gateway layer instead of scattering it across service code.

I tested Tyk 5.7.1 in a hybrid deployment: Cursor IDE extensions hitting a Tyk-fronted MCP server, with fallback routing to B-Lost's relay gateway ( https://b-lost.com/v1 ) when primary providers hit quota or latency spikes. The goal was zero client-side retry logic and sub-200ms failover switching.

Architecture: Three-Tier Routing Topology

Layer 1: Tyk API Definition with MCP Transport

Tyk's MCP support lives in the API definition schema.…