What does it mean that MCP is transport agnostic?

One of MCP's key strengths is being transport agnostic, which is a fancy way of saying the client and server can communicate over different protocols depending on your setup. The most common configuration runs both the MCP client and server on the same machine, communicating through standard input and output. But you can also connect them over HTTP, including a streamable HTTP transport for remote servers, and over various other network protocols. This flexibility means the same MCP server implementation can work in a local development setup, in a production deployment over a network, or embedded into a desktop application, without rewriting the server's logic.