Ai-Tools

Before MCP existed, adding tools to an AI application meant writing the same glue code over and over. You had OpenAI’s function calling syntax. Anthropic had tool use with a slightly different schema. LangChain abstracted over both, but now you depended on LangChain’s versioning decisions. Every new model provider meant rewriting your tool definitions. Every new tool meant re-registering it across every AI integration you maintained.

Docker shipped a set of tools that let a platform team decide exactly which Model Context Protocol servers developers can run: a catalog format, an open-source Gateway, and a Toolkit built into Docker Desktop. The official catalog carries 220+ containerized MCP servers, and you can fork it, trim it, or build a private catalog that points at images in your own registry.