Zilla AI Gateway · MCP
One governed MCP endpoint for your APIs, data, and infrastructure
Connect AI agents to existing MCP servers, REST and OpenAPI APIs, Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Schema Registry — without SDK wrappers or custom MCP servers. Authenticate every caller, control what they can discover and invoke, mediate credentials, enforce guardrails, and observe every interaction from one gateway.
Any MCP client. Any enterprise backend. One governed endpoint.
The Production gap
MCP works in a demo. Production asks harder questions.
How do hundreds of internal APIs become tools?
The common answer is a wrapper farm: one hand-written MCP server per system, each with its own auth, hosting, and owner.
How do you govern what agents can actually do?
Each caller needs its own view of what it can discover and invoke, backend credentials it never holds, and validation before an action reaches a production system.
What do 400 tools do to a context window?
Every exposed tool costs tokens on every request, whether the agent needs it or not.
The Solution
A gateway, not an agent runtime
For existing MCP servers, Zilla proxies MCP natively and federates their tools, prompts, and resources behind one endpoint.
For REST APIs, OpenAPI specifications, Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Schema Registry, Zilla presents MCP-native tools and resources directly — without requiring another MCP server or application layer in between.
Routing, authentication, authorization, discovery, credential mediation, validation, and telemetry happen at the gateway. Tool logic stays in the systems that already own it.
Backend Connectivity
Connect agents to the systems you already run
Federate existing MCP servers
Put remote MCP servers behind one endpoint. Their tools, prompts, and resources merge into one namespaced catalog, routed by toolkit, under the same per-identity policy.
Turn existing APIs into agent capabilities
Point Zilla at an OpenAPI document and it generates MCP tools and resources automatically. APIs without a spec work too: map plain HTTP endpoints explicitly in configuration.
Adapt APIs without forking their specs
OpenAPI overlays patch a third-party spec at the gateway: add security requirements, change servers, or attach MCP metadata while the original document stays untouched.
Kafka-native
Give agents native access to Kafka — not another wrapper API
Zilla speaks the Kafka protocol natively. Agents work with topics, connectors, and schemas directly through MCP, with no REST hop, no custom MCP server, and no application code standing in front of the cluster.
Kafka
Produce and consume messages, and manage topics, brokers, clusters, consumer groups, configs, and ACLs as MCP tools over the native Kafka protocol.
Kafka Connect
Create and update connectors, check their status, pause, resume, and restart them, and manage connector offsets, all as MCP tools.
Schema Registry
List subjects, register and read schemas, and check compatibility before a schema change reaches producers and consumers.
Identity
Identity and credential mediation
Zilla authenticates every caller and authorizes tools, prompts, and resources per identity. Backend credentials stay behind the gateway, so agents never hold them.
Authorize per identity
Callers authenticate with JWT bearer tokens over TLS or mTLS. Zilla authorizes tools, prompts, and resources per identity, by role, before a call reaches a backend.
Keep backend credentials behind the gateway
Agents never hold upstream secrets. With Zilla Plus, the gateway authenticates to each backend with client credentials, or exchanges the caller's token for the credential that backend expects.
OAuth without credential files
Zilla Plus supports authorization code with PKCE and dynamic or static client registration for OAuth-protected upstreams, so users grant access in the browser instead of pasting tokens.
Tool Discovery
Tool discovery at enterprise scale
Eager tools ship with every session. Cold tools stay out of the listing until an agent needs them, so a catalog can grow to hundreds of tools without flooding the context window. Discovery follows authorization: callers can only list, search, and describe the tools they are allowed to invoke.
Search → Describe → Execute
An agent searches for a cold tool, resolves its schema, and calls it, without that tool ever crowding the default listing.
Search by meaning, not just keywords
Tool search can combine keyword matching with embedding-based ranking, so agents find the right tool even when the words differ.
Adaptive discovery
With Zilla Plus, policies promote tools into the eager set based on size and usage, so the listing tracks what agents actually reach for.
Human-in-the-loop · Elicitation
Keep people in the loop when an action needs them
When a tool call needs a person, Zilla relays MCP elicitation between the backend and the client without breaking the flow. Form mode asks for missing information, a confirmation, or an approval. URL mode sends the user to a browser for an out-of-band step, such as OAuth consent, and resumes the call when it completes.
Form mode collects a missing field instead of failing the call.
Form mode asks for confirmation or approval before a sensitive action runs.
URL mode handles OAuth consent in the browser, returned inside the MCP response.
Tokens are cached per user, and newly authorized tools appear in the next tools/list.
Guardrails
Enforce contracts before agents act
Validate what agents send and what backends return at the gateway, before anything reaches a production system. These are policy-driven gateway guardrails, not a general-purpose DLP platform.
Validate arguments and responses
Check tool arguments and tool responses against JSON, Avro, or Protobuf schemas. Calls that break the contract are rejected before they reach a backend.
Transform between formats
Agents work in JSON while backends keep Avro or Protobuf. Zilla transforms payloads in both directions, so neither side has to change.
Semantic checks on free text
Apply embedding-based semantic checks to free-text values, catching content that a schema alone cannot describe.
Observability & Scale
See what every agent is doing
Every MCP interaction is measured at the gateway, with no instrumentation in the agent. The data plane stays stateless, so production deployments scale out behind a load balancer.
Measure the full MCP lifecycle
Metrics and logs cover initialization, discovery, and tool invocation, broken down by toolkit, tool, and outcome.
Export to the stack you run
Send telemetry to Prometheus, OTLP/OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, or Syslog.
Scale out with shared state
Use in-memory state for development. In production, Zilla Plus keeps shared state in Redis or Hazelcast, so multiple Zilla instances run behind a load balancer.
Integrations
Works with your existing stack.
Drop the gateway in front of what you already run. Any MCP client connects with an endpoint and a bearer token; identity, monitoring, and deployment plug into your existing tools.
JWT
OAuth 2.1
Your IdP
TLS / mTLS
Prometheus
OpenTelemetry
CloudWatch
Syslog
Kubernetes
AMI
Container
AWS Marketplace
FAQ
Questions, answered.
Connect your agents to enterprise systems without building another layer of wrappers.
Start free with Zilla, or request a demo to see Zilla Plus running against your systems.
Explore pricing
Straightforward, usage-based pricing with no per-connection surprises — start free and scale when you are ready.
Join the Community
Trade notes with the engineers running Zilla in production, and get help from the team in Slack or Discord.
