Building MCP servers in the real world - The Pragmatic Engineer

> “One of the most interesting things that we [at Prefect] have observed is that we expected to see every company launch an MCP server, and that their customers would begin interacting with them in that way. But that is not what is happening. Many companies are* launching * MCP servers, but not publicly. > There are perhaps 10 MCP servers that are heavily used, from major developer-facing companies. Then, there’s this massive long tail of public servers with close to zero users, built for personal use.” … “Turns out, MCP is being used especially heavily by internal data and platform teams to give internal users access to systems. These are systems that these users perhaps already had access to, but it was either too complex or too broad, or needed a lot of documentation or special skills to use. > We also came across interesting cases where users didn’t have access to a system because the team owning that service didn’t have a trusted way to build a workflow to make those tools available. … **#3: Median MCP user. ** This user might be different from some expectations;** ** my initial idea of a dev using MCP is someone who connects a Linear or Figma MCP server to their agent to get things done faster. But Jeremiah says not: > “The median MCP user is someone who says something like: ‘I want to access my company’s own data warehouse through an MCP server’, and uses an internal MCP that they connect to the agent they’re using.” … ### Why internal usage makes sense MCP has many limitations currently which work against public-facing usage, such as: