Docker’s new MCP Catalog, Toolkit to solve major developer challenges, experts say

Docker, provider of containers for application development, is planning to add a new Model Context Protocol (MCP) Catalog and a Toolkit that experts say could solve major challenges faced by developers when building out agentic applications.Anthropic’s MCP, which was released in November last year, is an open protocol that allows AI agents inside applications to access external tools and data to complete a user request using a client-server mechanism, where the client is the AI agent and the server provides tools and data.

Agentic applications, which can perform tasks without manual intervention, have caught the fancy of enterprises as they allow them to do more with constrained resources.

But without MCP, developers would face a major challenge: they would be unable to connect disparate data sources and tools with large language models (LLMs), without which agents cannot perform tasks on their own.  

Docker, which is where at least 20 million developers build their applications, is adding Catalog and Toolkit as it says that despite MCP’s popularity, its experience is “not production-ready — yet.”

“Discovery (of tools) is fragmented, trust is manual, and core capabilities like security and authentication are still patched together with workarounds,” Docker executives wrote in a blog post.

Paul Chada, co-founder of DoozerAI, an agentic digital worker platform, said that presently, MCP servers are messy client-side installs and not true enterprise-grade solutions, meaning they run directly on users’ PCs and potentially expose credentials.

Catalog and Toolkit are expected to solve challenges related to tool discovery, credential management, and security, with the Catalog serving as the home for discovering MCP tools and Toolkit simplifying the process of running and managing MCP servers securely, the executives explained.

MCP Catalog to aid tools discovery

The Catalog, according to Docker, is essentially a marketplace where authors or builders of these tools can publish them for developers to discover.

To get the marketplace running, Docker has partnered with several companies, including Stripe, Elastic, Heroku, Pulumi, Grafana Labs, Kong Inc., Neo4j, New Relic, and Continue.dev, the executives said. At launch, the marketplace would contain over 100 verified tools.

Chada sees MCP Catalog serving as an accredited, secure hub and marketplace for MCP servers, which can then be subsequently deployed into Docker containers using the new MCP Toolkit.

“The Catalog will help developers find trusted or verified tools, which reduces the risk of security breaches,” Chada explained.

In the same vein, Moor Insights and Strategy’s principal analyst Jason Andersen said that Docker is probably the first to try and build a centralized place to discover tools related to MCP, which is non-existent presently as the protocol is very new.

MCP Toolkit for simple management of MCP servers

Docker’s MCP Toolkit, according to Chada, solves key developer challenges, such as environment conflicts, security vulnerabilities from host access, complex setup requirements, and cross-platform inconsistencies, by offering features

“To bypass developer challenges, the Toolkit offers a one-click deployment from Docker Desktop, built-in credential management, containerized isolation, a Gateway Server, and a dedicated command line interface (CLI),” Chada said.

“By containerizing MCP servers, Docker creates a standardized, secure environment where developers can focus on building AI applications rather than wrestling with configuration and security issues,” Chada added.

Both Catalog and Toolkit are expected to be made available in May, the company said. However, it is yet to finalize the pricing of both offerings.

Both Chada and Andersen believe that Docker’s rivals, such as Kubernetes, are also expected to add similar capabilities soon. Andersen further believes that most cloud service providers will also start offering something similar to the Catalog and Toolkit as MCP’s popularity grows.