Quick Primer on MCP Using Ollama and LangChain

Summary

Quick Primer on Model Context Protocol (MCP) When LLMs first made their first appearance, the Enterprise apps built using LLMs were restricted to the knowledge on what the LLMs where trained on. These apps were useful for a set of tasks such as, text generation, text sentiment analysis, text summarization, etc. The next evolution for LLM apps was the integration with Enterprise data assets via the Vector Stores for contextual knowledge retrieval using RAGs. As agentic frameworks like LangChain came along with support for tools integration for automating manual tasks, the LLM apps evolved to drive automation in the Enterprise environment. The challenge however was that there was no industry standard for tools integration and every framework had its own approach to tools integration. Enter the Model Context Protocol (or MCP) that has changed the landscape for tools integration. Think of MCP as a industry standard layer on top of the other Enterprise services that allows any agentic framework (such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc) to consistently integrate with the Enterprise tools. In other words, MCP is an open protocol that enables seamless integration between the LLM apps and the external data sources (databases, files, etc) and tools (github, servicenow, etc). The MCP specification consists of the following core components: MCP Server: connects to various external as well as internal data sources and tools for exposing specific capabilities to the agentic LLM apps. Think of these as service providers MCP Client: connects and interacts with the MCP Server(s) in a standardized manner MCP Host: the LLM app(s) that use the MCP Client to access the MCP Server(s) The installation and setup will be on a Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based Linux desktop. Ensure that Python 3.x programming language is installed and setup on the desktop. In addition, ensure that Ollama is installed and setup on the Linux desktop (refer to for instructions). Assuming that the ip address on the Linux deskto...