Practical MCP with FastMCP & LangChain

The MCP Server

Both MCP host and client are part of the same application, but the MCP server is an external service that exposes different tools to the client via a standardized protocol - the Model Context Protocol.

It can run locally on the same machine as the host like a process and communicates with via standard streams (e.g. a local git server, a local filesystem server, or a local SQLite database). This is commonly referred to as a local MCP server.

It can also run remotely over a network protocol like HTTP (e.g. a remote observability tool, a knowledge graph service, or a remote database). This is commonly referred to as a remote MCP server