How Smartsheet built a remote MCP server on AWS
AWS Machine Learning Vasil Kosturski
Smartsheet built a remote Model Context Protocol server on AWS that allows AI agents to access Smartsheet data and capabilities through natural language interfaces and autonomous workflows. The infrastructure uses AWS Fargate, Kinesis, Neptune, and Bedrock, with optimizations that have saved over 3 billion tokens through techniques like progressive disclosure, schema-driven tool contracts, and proprietary serialization reducing token count by 35–47 percent. The system includes layered security, governance controls, observability through OpenTelemetry and Datadog, and automated deployment with canary testing to ensure AI agents can reliably work with enterprise data while maintaining performance and compliance.
Why it matters
In this post, we cover a high-level view of the Smartsheet remote MCP architecture, with a focus on the AWS infrastructure behind it. This includes security, governance, scaling and deployment, and the AI-specific optimizations Smartsheet built on AWS.
