Speaker
Abstract
As API programs mature, a familiar gap emerges: some teams operate with strong standards, reusable platforms, and clear governance, while others rely on informal guidance and best-effort consistency. That disparity becomes a real risk at scale, even if it feels manageable when API consumers are known systems and human-built integrations.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes the shape of the problem. APIs aren’t just consumed by human developers anymore — they’re consumed by tools and autonomous agents. That shift forces API programs to answer uncomfortable questions:
- What does an “API product” mean when the primary consumer is an agent?
- How do you introduce governance changes without slowing delivery to a crawl?
- How do you roll out fixes, evolving controls, and improvements across 200+ APIs without creating endless upgrade work for teams?
This talk explores how to evolve API programs for MCP-era workloads, using platform capabilities and FINOS Architecture as Code to improve both speed and security.
You’ll learn practical ways to:
- Build self-service guardrails that help teams move fast without turning governance into central gatekeeping.
- Codify architectural patterns to define and enforce security standards, automate compliance checks, detect drift, and roll out changes safely.
- Scale innovation reliably across large API estates — reducing fragmentation, limiting manual coordination, and keeping security outcomes measurable.
- Attendees will leave with practical patterns, examples, and an approach they can apply immediately to modernize governance for agent-driven consumption — without turning their API program into bureaucracy.
Topics
QCon London 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Monday 16 March
10:35 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session architecture From Fan-Out to Fast: Sub-100ms API Design in Distributed Systems Saranya Vedagiri Senior Staff Engineer @eBay A “simple” API request rarely stays simple. In distributed systems, one call quickly turns into fan-out across gateways, services, caches, and databases — and your p99 becomes the sum of every hop and every flaky dependency. 11:45 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session Observability Uncorking Queueing Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry Julian Wreford, Oli Lane Queues are the backbone of scalable, asynchronous systems, but they can easily create a tangled web of complexity. When things slow down, the bottleneck could be anywhere, from producer lag to consumer exhaustion, and standard metrics often fail to show the full picture. 13:35 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session Platform Engineering APIs for Agents: Rethinking API Programs in the MCP Era Jim Gough, Andreea Niculcea As API programs mature, a familiar gap emerges: some teams operate with strong standards, reusable platforms, and clear governance, while others rely on informal guidance and best-effort consistency. 14:45 Rutherford (4th Fl.) Unconference Unconference: Connecting Systems 15:55 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session AI Enchant Your AI and APIs with eBPF Magic 🪄 Dan Finneran Principal Community Advocate at Isovalent @Cisco It is a common occurrence to see applications thrown over the fence, landing somewhere in production without a second thought about their lifecycle or how they may need maintaining in the future to connect to more efficient API endpoints. 17:05 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session architecture Managing Asynchronous APIs at Scale Ian Cooper Senior Principal Engineer @Just Eat Takeaway When event-driven architectures are small, teams can reason about events through word-of-mouth. They know who publishes what, who consumes it, and how messages flow through the system. Teams manage their own infrastructure or raise tickets to request changes.