Transport

Choosing the right transport affects latency, deployment model, and security. Local dev uses stdio; production team servers use HTTP.

MCP transport is the road type — driveway (stdio) for home, highway (HTTP) for long-distance travel.

Scenario

A local filesystem server uses stdio. A company-wide Notion MCP server uses Streamable HTTP behind an API gateway with OAuth.

Solution

In Model Context Protocol, apply Transport to this scenario: A local filesystem server uses stdio. Identify the inputs, run the technique, validate the output, and note one thing you would monitor in production.

Do this before moving to the next module — reading alone is not enough.

Open the Code Walkthrough below and run it locally. Change one parameter related to Transport (e.g. model, temperature, top_k, or tool name), observe the difference in output, and write 2–3 sentences explaining what changed.

Highlighted lines show where Transport happens in the code.

1# Transport — minimal example2from openai import OpenAI3
4client = OpenAI()  # create API client5
6# Ask the model to explain this topic7response = client.chat.completions.create(  # core API call for Transport8    model="gpt-4o-mini",9    messages=[10        {"role": "system", "content": "You explain transport clearly."},11        {"role": "user", "content": f"What is transport?"},12    ],13    temperature=0,14)15print(response.choices[0].message.content)  # show output for debugging

• Treating Transport as a black box without evaluation
• Ignoring cost and latency in production
• Skipping error handling for transport

Quick recap — the most important points from this module.