GitHub's MCP Server Drops Redis After Spec Upgrade

GitHub's MCP Server now runs the next MCP specification, and its Go SDK needed zero code changes, per the company's July 23 changelog.

That's the headline result for anyone weighing this migration: the new spec is real engineering work, but GitHub shipped it without rewriting a working integration.

Two pieces of infrastructure went away in the process. Redis, which GitHub used to track session state between requests, is gone because the new spec's core is stateless. Deep packet inspection of request payloads is also gone, though GitHub's changelog doesn't say what replaced that validation.

Elicitation changed too. It now runs as a multi-round-trip exchange over HTTP, handled by the SDKs instead of custom code in each server.

Conformance tests are the other new piece. GitHub says all tier-1 SDKs keep backwards compatibility with the prior spec. The tests let other implementations check themselves against that baseline, instead of taking GitHub's word for it.

The catch

This account covers one SDK, in Go, inside one company's infrastructure. It doesn't say whether teams on other tier-1 SDKs, or running less stateless-friendly stacks, see the same zero-change result.

The backwards-compatibility guarantee across every tier-1 SDK is what decides how rough this gets for everyone else, and that data isn't published yet.