What Is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI models connect to external tools and data sources. It’s what turns Claude from a smart assistant into a connected agent.

The Problem MCP Solves

Without MCP, Claude Code can:

• Read and write files on your machine
• Run shell commands
• Search your codebase

That’s powerful, but limited. What about:

• Your Notion workspace?
• Your Cloudflare dashboard?
• Your database on a remote server?
• Your project management tool?
• Your company’s internal APIs?

MCP bridges this gap. It gives Claude a standardized way to discover and use external tools.

How MCP Works

┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐
│  Claude Code  │────▶│  MCP Server   │────▶│  External     │
│  (Client)     │◀────│  (Bridge)     │◀────│  Service      │
└──────────────┘     └──────────────┘     └──────────────┘

1. MCP Client (Claude Code) discovers available tools from MCP servers
2. MCP Server exposes tools that Claude can call (like “create_page”, “query_database”)
3. External Service (Notion, Cloudflare, GitHub, etc.) processes the actual request

The MCP server acts as a translator between Claude’s tool-calling format and the external service’s API.

What MCP Servers Provide

An MCP server can expose three types of capabilities:

Tools

Actions Claude can take — creating records, querying data, sending messages.

Resources

Data Claude can read — documents, database records, configuration.

Prompts

Pre-built prompt templates for common tasks with that service.

Available MCP Servers

The MCP ecosystem is growing fast. Some notable servers:

Server	What It Connects To
Cloudflare	Workers, D1, KV, R2, Pages
Notion	Pages, databases, comments
GitHub	Issues, PRs, repos
Slack	Channels, messages
PostgreSQL	Direct database queries
Filesystem	Extended file operations
Brave Search	Web search results

Why MCP Matters

Before MCP, connecting an AI to a new service required:

• Custom integration code
• Service-specific prompt engineering
• Brittle API wrappers

With MCP:

• One protocol to learn
• Servers are reusable across AI clients
• Community-maintained servers for popular services
• You can build your own for internal tools

MCP in This Course

We’ll use MCP extensively:

• Module 3 (this module) — connecting to services and building servers
• Module 5 — Cloudflare MCP for cloud infrastructure
• Module 6 — MCP in automation pipelines
• Module 7 — building projects with MCP integrations