BrainGrid solves MCP multi-tenant authentication with Redis session caching and WorkOS OAuth
MCP servers that work locally fail under multi-tenant serverless deployments because serverless platforms have no session persistence, forcing customers to re-authenticate on every new instance. Without shared session state, each JWT validation adds significant latency per request.
How it works
Common implementation structure
How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.
Stage 1 · Request with bearer token
A request arrives at the MCP server and the bearer token is extracted from the Authorization header.
BrainGrid's MCP server now authenticates once and works across all serverless instances by using an encrypted Redis session store and a fast-path/slow-path authentication middleware, serving hundreds of developers in production.
What failed first
Storing sessions in an in-memory Map fails in serverless environments because each new instance starts with empty state. Full JWT validation on every request without a shared cache adds 50-100ms per request and increases costs significantly.