Serverless Expeditions — selected guide
Power your AI agents with MCP tools on Google Cloud Run
Fourteen episodes on service choice, architecture, scaling, state, security, operations, and delivery
Serverless design and operations through concrete examples: choosing a runtime, ordering events, managing relational state, undoing failed workflows, protecting secrets, and deploying changes safely. The selection also includes two AI-agent examples covering tools and database access.
In this collection Browse 14 summaries 13 of 14
Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives agents a common interface for discovering and calling tools. In this November 2025 demonstration, Jack, a Python developer advocate at Google Cloud, connects a lawn-care chatbot to a sprinkler company's price-quote tool hosted on Cloud Run.
Key points
- The tool supplies a calculation the chatbot can call: A customer asks what a sprinkler installation would cost. The quote tool calculates the price from the country and lawn area, letting the chatbot use the supplier's business logic rather than invent a price 01:56–04:49(opens in a new tab).
- The server publishes the tool's interface: A FastMCP annotation exposes the Python calculation function. The chatbot, built with Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK), receives the server URL as a toolset and discovers the tool's description and parameters. Both the chatbot and MCP server run on Cloud Run in the demo 03:54–05:40(opens in a new tab).
- Authentication is explicitly evolving: The presenter says the MCP support shown includes OAuth for user authentication and can use Cloud Run bearer authentication for service-to-service access 06:44–07:38(opens in a new tab). The episode does not establish a complete authorization design.
- An existing API need not be rewritten: Jack describes generating an MCP server from an OpenAPI specification, a description of an HTTP API, or writing a small FastMCP proxy that forwards calls to the existing API. These are ways to expose existing business logic through the common tool interface 07:38–08:30(opens in a new tab).
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Gap8vWV28(opens in a new tab)