The Atlassian A2A Gateway is a cloud-hosted Agent2Agent (A2A) server that lets external AI agents communicate with Atlassian Rovo. While MCP lets AI clients invoke individual tools, A2A lets agents hand off higher-level requests to Rovo through a standard JSON-RPC 2.0 interface.

What you can do

With the A2A Gateway, external agents can ask Rovo to:

Search and summarize Jira issues, Confluence pages, and other Atlassian content.
Create work items and pages using natural language requests.
Answer questions about the Atlassian data the authenticated user can already access.
Handle multi-step requests, such as finding open bugs and summarizing them in a Confluence page.

How it works

The A2A protocol defines a standard way for agents to discover, authenticate, and communicate with each other:

An external agent fetches Rovo's Agent Card at https://a2a.atlassian.com/.well-known/agent.json to discover the gateway endpoint, advertised skills, and authentication requirements.
The agent authenticates using OAuth 2.0 with PKCE. Client registration happens through Dynamic Client Registration (DCR).
The agent sends JSON-RPC requests to the gateway endpoint at https://a2a.atlassian.com/v1/rovo.
Rovo processes the request using its underlying Atlassian product capabilities and returns a task response.
All actions respect the authenticated user's existing Atlassian permissions.

1
2
External Agent
  → Agent Card discovery (/.well-known/agent.json)
    → OAuth 2.0 authentication
      → JSON-RPC request (message/stream)
        → Rovo agent
          → Atlassian Cloud APIs (Jira, Confluence, etc.)
            → Task response

The gateway proxies synchronous JSON-RPC methods and SSE streaming methods. Use message/stream for requests that may exceed the synchronous response limit, which the CDN enforces at roughly 30 seconds. See Task handling.

How A2A differs from MCP

Aspect	MCP	A2A
Protocol	Model Context Protocol	Agent2Agent (JSON-RPC 2.0)
Domain	`mcp.atlassian.com`	`a2a.atlassian.com`
Transport	Streamable HTTP (bidirectional)	HTTP POST, SSE streaming
Auth methods	OAuth 2.0, API tokens	OAuth 2.0 only
Consumers	AI clients (Claude, ChatGPT, IDEs)	External AI agents
Interaction model	Individual tool calls	Task-based conversations
Discovery	OAuth Protected Resource Metadata	Agent Card (`/.well-known/agent.json`)

Compatible agents

The A2A Gateway implements A2A protocol version 0.3.0 and is designed for agents that implement the A2A protocol specification and can complete the required OAuth 2.0 flow with PKCE.

Your agent platform must register with Atlassian through Dynamic Client Registration (DCR). Manual OAuth client creation is not supported, so a platform that asks you to paste in a client ID and client secret cannot connect. See Authentication for why.

Next steps

Getting started — Connect an external agent to Rovo via A2A.
Architecture — Understand the request flow, components, and current method support.
Authentication — Learn about OAuth 2.0, PKCE, DCR, and org enablement.
Agent skills — Explore the skills Rovo advertises to external agents.
Agent Card schema — Field-by-field reference for the Agent Card.
Admin controls — Understand the organization-level enablement required for task execution.
End-to-end testing: Run an authenticated request end to end.
Troubleshooting — Diagnose discovery, authentication, streaming, and synchronous request failures.
Debugging — Run quick verification checks against the live endpoints.

Looking for tool-level MCP documentation? See the Atlassian Rovo MCP Server docs to connect AI clients to Jira, Confluence, Compass, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket, and Rovo using the Model Context Protocol.