Signals

MCP defines tools, resources and prompts over JSON-RPC 2.0 with stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, and is supported across Claude, ChatGPT, Visual Studio Code and Cursor. Protocol version 2026-07-28 made it stateless and added a mandatory server/discover request. (Model Context Protocol documentation)

Integrations built once become portable across hosts, which removes a real cost. It also moves the security question: an MCP server is a tool surface reachable by any connected host, so its permissions are the blast radius, and a protocol that changed statelessness and deprecated sampling in one version is not yet stable enough to build without a migration plan.

OWASP moved Excessive Agency to third in the 2026 Top 10 for LLM Applications, above several long-standing content risks. The project states the ordering reflects observed incidents rather than expert opinion. (OWASP GenAI Security Project, 2026)

Controls that inspect model output are aimed at the previous problem. The controls that matter now bound what a compromised model is permitted to do: per-action authorisation, human approval for anything irreversible, and credentials scoped to the task rather than the user.

Nasr et al. (2025) evaluated twelve recent defences and found static attack success rates near zero while adaptive attack success exceeded 90% against most of them. (Nasr et al., 2025)

A published defence benchmark is not evidence that a defence holds. Treat injection as an architecture problem rather than a filtering one, and assume the filter will eventually be bypassed when deciding what the model is allowed to reach.

pgvector adds vector types and both HNSW and IVFFlat indexes to PostgreSQL, and MySQL 9.7 documents a native VECTOR type. Both are in general-availability releases, not previews. (pgvector; MySQL 9.7 Reference Manual)

For workloads already on a relational database, a dedicated vector store now needs a specific justification - scale, or a feature the extension lacks - rather than being the default. The trade-off moves to recall measurement, because approximate indexes change which rows come back.

MySQL documents 9.7 as the final release using sequential versioning, with later releases moving to calendar versioning in a YY.M form. MySQL 8.0 reached end of life on 30 April 2026. (MySQL 9.7 Reference Manual)

Version-pinning policies and upgrade-path assumptions written against sequential numbering will not survive the change. Anything that infers support status from a version number needs revisiting.

Patroni stores cluster state in a distributed configuration store and demotes the primary when that store is unreachable, on the documented assumption that unreachability means network partitioning. etcd's own guidance is that it is fsync-bound, with p99 WAL fsync under 10 ms. (Patroni documentation; etcd v3.6 documentation)

Adopting automatic failover means adopting etcd's disk requirements as your database's availability requirements. Putting etcd on shared or network storage is a common cause of instability, and the failure presents as unexplained database demotions.

VRRP depends on multicast and gratuitous ARP. Azure documents that its virtual network provides no Layer 2 semantics and permits only TCP, UDP, ESP, AH and ICMP; Google documents no VPC multicast support; AWS documents no broadcast support. (Azure, Google Cloud and AWS network documentation)

A keepalived design lifted from a datacentre will fail on these networks, often intermittently rather than obviously. Use the platform's load balancer for the address-failover role and keep keepalived for physical networks.

The EU AI Act applies on fixed dates - prohibitions from 2 February 2025, general-purpose AI obligations and penalties from 2 August 2025, general application 2 August 2026 - with fines under Article 99(3) up to EUR 35 000 000 or 7% of worldwide annual turnover. (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689)

Governance work can no longer be scheduled against internal readiness. The classification question - whether a use falls in an Annex III area - now determines a documentation and logging burden with a deadline attached.