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Call for submissions: Platform Engineering meet-ups

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Malepati Bala Siva Sai Akhil

Malepati Bala Siva Sai Akhil

@saiakhil2012

Deciphering MCP and A2A at the Wire Level

Submitted Jun 22, 2026

Session type: Talk (30 mins) Submission made for: Bangalore meet-ups

Description

Everyone has seen the MCP and A2A diagrams. But what is actually happening on the wire? This talk deciphers both protocols at the transport and message level using a wire inspector, so engineers who think in systems can finally see what is underneath the abstraction. The talk walks through an MCP conversation from capability negotiation through tool discovery and tool call execution, then switches to A2A and shows how Agent Card discovery plays out as actual HTTP exchanges.

Along the way, two things become clear. The MCP handshake looks a lot like a TLS negotiation, and A2A’s Agent Card discovery at /.well-known/agent.json is essentially a DNS lookup for agents. These protocols are solving familiar distributed systems problems, just for a new kind of participant on the network. The talk also covers why MCP moved from stateful SSE to stateless Streamable HTTP and what that shift means for how these systems can be deployed.

Key Takeaways

  • A wire-level picture of how MCP and A2A actually work. What the messages look like, how capability negotiation happens, how agents discover each other. Grounded in wire captures rather than diagrams.
  • A clear sense of why MCP’s transport evolved from SSE to Streamable HTTP and what that means practically, so engineers know what they are actually running when AI agents start showing up in their infrastructure.

Audience

This session is beneficial for:

  • Platform Engineers
  • Infrastructure Engineers and SREs
  • DevOps Engineers
  • Distributed Systems Engineers
  • AI Infrastructure Teams

Speaker Bio

Malepati Bala Siva Sai Akhil is a Principal Software Engineer at Couchbase. He specializes in distributed systems, AI infrastructure, and cloud-native platforms, with experience across Intel, VMware, and Huawei building large-scale systems across federated AI, confidential computing, and cloud-native infrastructure. Honored as one of IEEE Computer Society’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals (2024), recipient of the Intel Distinguished Invention Award, he has filed patents across AI, security, and distributed systems, and has authored research papers published in IEEE. He has spoken at MCP Dev Summit 2026 (Linux Foundation, Bangalore), API World 2025 and API World 2024 (Santa Clara, California). More at sessionize.com/bala-siva-sai-akhil-malepati

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