MCP Dev Summit North America

While it is now considered a best practice for agent skills to leverage MCP servers, there is still no widely accepted approach for how those MCP servers should be distributed, versioned, and shared as dependencies.

This talk presents a practical pattern for using OCI artifacts as a distribution mechanism for MCP servers and configurations that agent skills depend on, enabling reproducible, shareable, and composable agent capabilities.

We’ll walk through creating an agent skill that can build and run an MCP project as a containerized service, then publish supporting artifacts such as the MCP server’s configuration.

Rather than bundling dependencies directly, the agent skill references an OCI artifact by OCI ref, pulls it at runtime, and activates the required MCP servers automatically. This ensures that when prompts expect specific MCP servers to be available, they already are.

By treating OCI as a universal distribution layer for agent tooling metadata and configurations, this approach makes agent skills easier to share, reproduce, and evolve across teams and environments.