MCP handles tools. A2A handles coordination. Neither handles how agents find, authenticate, and route to each other across machines.

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This article argues that while protocols like MCP and A2A standardize tool access and agent coordination, they leave a major gap unresolved: networking between agents in real production environments. Using failures encountered in multi-cloud staging deployments, it explores the operational problems around service discovery, cross-organization authentication, transport latency, and peer-to-peer routing. The piece then examines the tradeoffs between service meshes, message brokers, and emerging session-layer overlays like libp2p and WireGuard-based meshes as teams search for a more reliable infrastructure layer for distributed agent systems.