Building MCP Servers in Python: a production primer for 2026

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) went from "Anthropic side project" to industry standard in eighteen months. As of March 2026, MCP SDKs are pulling 97 million monthly downloads . Every serious agent framework — Claude, Cursor, OpenAI Agents SDK, Microsoft Agent Framework — speaks MCP natively. If you're a Python backend engineer, MCP is the most leveraged thing you can learn right now. This post is a practical walkthrough of shipping a production-grade MCP server using FastMCP , the Python frame