TL;DR An MCP proxy forwards requests between AI agents and MCP servers — it handles transport, not governance. Fast to set up, hits a wall the moment you have more than one team or more than two servers An MCP gateway adds identity, RBAC, audit trails, and per-tool policy enforcement on top of that routing layer — it's where your organization's actual AI policy gets enforced We started with a proxy, got bitten by the exact things proxies don't handle, and ended up needing a gateway. Th...