MCP Professional — Claude Cert Academy

Build production-grade MCP servers.

The engineering certification for developers who build production-grade MCP servers. Five domain modules covering protocol architecture, the three MCP primitives, transport mechanisms, advanced bidirectional capabilities, and production security and observability — each mapped to a 60-question proctored exam.

What you'll learn

• Design and implement MCP servers using all three primitives — tools, resources, and prompts — with correct schema contracts
• Select and implement the right transport mechanism (stdio, StreamableHTTP) for a given deployment context, and maintain backward compatibility with deprecated HTTP+SSE servers
• Apply sampling, server-initiated notifications, roots, and elicitation to build bidirectional MCP servers
• Secure MCP servers with OAuth 2.1, capability scoping, input validation, and audit logging
• Instrument and operate MCP servers in production with structured logging, distributed tracing, and versioned upgrade paths

Course content

01. MCP Architecture & Protocol Fundamentals

• Why MCP exists: the N×M integration problem
• JSON-RPC 2.0 foundations and MCP wire format
• Capability negotiation and the initialization handshake
• Server lifecycle: startup, request loop, and graceful shutdown
• Client vs server roles and the host layer
• The three primitives: tools, resources, and prompts
• MCP vs raw tool use: when each applies
• Building your first MCP server end-to-end

02. Tools, Resources & Prompts

• Tool schema design and the inputSchema contract
• Tool call and response lifecycle: content types and error contracts
• Reducing argument hallucination with enum and typed constraints
• Resource types: text, blob, and embedded resources
• Resource URIs, URI templates, and the resource listing API
• Resource subscriptions and server-sent updates
• Prompt templates: arguments, embedded resources, and multi-turn flows
• Pagination patterns for large tool and resource listings

03. Transport Mechanisms & Server Communication

• stdio transport: local process communication and use cases
• HTTP+SSE transport: why it was deprecated and backward compatibility
• StreamableHTTP transport: resumable sessions and modern clients
• Choosing a transport: decision matrix and trade-offs
• Notifications: server-push without a request
• Progress reporting for long-running tool calls
• Cancellation: client-initiated and server-initiated
• Multi-server composition and connection pooling

04. Sampling, Notifications & Advanced Capabilities

• Sampling: server-initiated LLM calls and the human-in-the-loop contract
• Sampling request parameters: model preferences, stop sequences, and context
• Roots: exposing the client's file system boundary
• Elicitation: structured user input from the client side
• Logging levels and structured log messages from servers
• Completions: argument auto-complete for prompts and resources
• Dynamic tool registration and capability updates
• Building a bidirectional MCP server with sampling and notifications

05. Production Security, Observability & Deployment

• MCP authorization: OAuth 2.1, scopes, and token validation
• Input validation, output sanitization, and prompt injection defense
• Capability scoping: least-privilege server design
• Audit logging and tamper-evident event trails
• Structured logging and distributed tracing for MCP servers
• Rate limiting, backpressure, and abuse prevention
• Containerization, versioning, and backward-compatible upgrades
• Health checks, SLOs, and incident response for MCP servers

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