IcePanel contains a rich amount of data about your software architecture — everything from systems, apps, stores, components, relationships, and the details about them. As your model grows, making sense of your architecture gets harder.
Today, we’re releasing the IcePanel MCP server in beta. Connect your data in IcePanel with your LLM of choice and ask it questions to quickly get answers about your software architecture.
What’s new? ✨
What is MCP?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard for applications to communicate with LLMs. Anthropic created MCP in November 2024 and it has quickly gained widespread adoption. Think of it as a layer between your app and LLMs, a “USB-C port for AI applications”.
MCP is an open protocol supported by most apps like Cursor, Claude and CoPilot. ChatGPT plans on releasing an integration soon. IcePanel’s MCP integration will work with any app that supports tools.
How it works
After configuring your AI client with IcePanel, you’ll be able to ask it things like:
- What are my landscapes?
- Details about any model objects — “What does IcePanel do?”
- Object relationships — “What is this API service connected to?”
- Technology information — “What are the most commonly used tech in my system?”
- Team ownership — “What does team X own?”
Rollout and setup
This feature is currently in open beta and requires local installation. Setup instructions are available here. Please reach out to us at mail@icepanel.io if you need any help or have feedback. We’ll be adding more functionality as feedback rolls in.
Why did we ship this? 🤔
You’ve likely been inundated with an endless stream of AI and LLM news every single day. It’s clear there’s no turning back from here, and the job now is to figure out how to integrate AI in a way that’s approachable and useful to humans.
We’re approaching this carefully, but will continue to quickly explore ways to weave in AI where it’s valuable. We don’t believe AI will replace architects any time soon, whose role lies mainly in the higher levels of abstraction and acting as the interface between technology and business. Yet, recent advances will open the door for many more opportunities to help teams make sense of their systems. Look out for more experiments from us.
Release week (Day 4 of 7)
This is our fourth release during release week. 3 more releases to go! We’ll see you again tomorrow.