What is an MCP gateway, and do you need a catalogue first?

What is an MCP gateway? It is a service that sits between agents and their tools and brokers live tool calls. When teams talk about managing MCPs, they often mean two different jobs. One is that gateway. The other is a catalogue that records what is connected, how it should be used and who may see it. Joyst is deliberately the second.

Start with a catalogue.

• You cannot govern what you cannot see.

• Documentation and skills are content problems, not only networking problems.

• Permissions and audit are easier when you are not also routing every call.

• Agents already know how to talk to MCP servers. What they need is a single source of truth for what the organisation knows.

Where Joyst plays a live part.

Joyst hosts a skills MCP server so agents can fetch published skills and agent setups. Secrets can be substituted on the server for controlled HTTP calls. Neither makes Joyst a general MCP proxy for ClickUp, Missive or the rest of your tools.

Match the layer to the problem.

If the problem is that nobody knows what you have, start with a catalogue. If you must inspect every tool call, you may eventually need a gateway. You will still need an inventory and permissions. Read more about Joyst’s approach on the about page. For the practical side, see our guides to connecting remote MCP servers and MCP security.