Artificial Intelligence
Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD): An open specification for agent discovery
How AWS Agent Registry and the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification enable cross-environment discovery for your agents
As organizations scale their use of artificial intelligence (AI) agents and tools, finding the right resource becomes the hard part. Teams build Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, deploy agents, and create specialized tools, but without a central catalog, those resources stay siloed. Developers locate a resource, vet it, connect it, and maintain that connection manually. Worse, configuring an agent for one AI client doesn’t make it available to another.
This was manageable when a team wired up a handful of tools. It doesn’t scale to a growing number of agents, MCP servers, skills, and APIs now spread across public registries and private enterprise estates.
AWS Agent Registry: A centralized, searchable catalog
AWS Agent Registry gives your organization a centralized catalog for agents, MCP servers, tools, agent skills, and custom resources. It’s built around two core concepts:
- Registries. A registry is a catalog you create in your AWS account with its own authorization configuration and approval settings. You can run a single org-wide registry or separate registries by resource type, stage, or team. With cross-account sharing, a registry can serve your entire AWS Organization.
- Registry Records. A record represents an individual resource, capturing metadata that describes what it is, what it does, and how to reach it.
The workflow is straightforward
- Create a registry: An administrator creates a registry, configures approval settings, and sets up authorization using either AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or a JSON Web Token (JWT) from your corporate identity provider.
- Publish records: A publisher describes their MCP servers, agents, or tools as records and submits them for approval.
- Curate records and approve: A curator reviews pending records, approves or rejects them, and deprecates records no longer in use.
- Discover approved resources: Consumers, whether human users or AI agents, search the registry for the resources they need.
What makes it enterprise-ready
- Curation: An approval workflow ensures only records that meet your security, compliance, and quality bar are discoverable. Administrators can remove a record from discovery at any time.
- Hybrid search: Semantic understanding combined with keyword matching, so both natural-language queries and exact name lookups return relevant results.
- MCP-native access: The registry is available at a remote MCP endpoint, so any MCP-compatible client can search and use it directly.
- Flexible authorization: Control access with IAM credentials or JWTs from your corporate identity provider.
The multi-environment challenge
AWS Agent Registry solves discovery within your AWS environment. But most enterprises don’t operate in one place. Agents and tools are deployed across multiple clouds, on-premises infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and enterprise applications, each with its own registry, naming convention, and metadata schema.
When each environment uses its own format for describing agentic resources, bringing it all together requires bespoke connectors for every pair of registries that need to interoperate. A shared specification changes that equation: if every registry describes resources in the same format and exposes discovery through a common protocol, publishers describe once and consumers discover everywhere.
Enter: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)
ARD is an open standard, not a product or a single registry. It’s available under the Apache License 2.0 at agenticresourcediscovery.org and on GitHub. AWS contributed feedback during the spec’s development.
Think of ARD as enabling federation across registries analogous to how the Domain Name System (DNS) enables name resolution across networks. An organization can deploy agents across environments, and each environment’s catalog surfaces these resources in a common protocol, behind an endpoint. For combined discovery, any registry can index across them using an understanding of the shared common protocol. Thus, local registries can federate through ARD without requiring bilateral agreements or proprietary connectors.
How ARD can complement AWS Agent Registry
We see ARD as a natural complement to the AWS Agent Registry model:
- Federate without migrating: Organizations with agentic infrastructure spread across clouds, on-premises, and SaaS could expose those resources in one consistent format. We expect ARD to enable cross-environment discovery while keeping control local.
- Discover globally, control locally: ARD’s design mirrors the control model AWS customers expect: the organization that publishes a catalog controls what’s in it, who can see it, and when to revoke access. We expect the existing access controls of AWS Agent Registry to remain at the enforcement point, with ARD serving as the interoperability layer.
- Enable public discovery: With ARD as a shared protocol, any organization can publish a catalog on its own domain, making it discoverable by any ARD-compatible client. We expect ARD to open cross-organizational discovery paths for Agent Registry customers.
Learn more
- Read the ARD specification to understand the catalog and registry model.
- Explore the reference implementations on GitHub.
- Check out the AWS Agent Registry documentation.
- Read more about the launch in AWS Agent Registry now in preview.
This is only the beginning. We’d love your feedback as AWS Agent Registry and our support for open discovery standards evolve.
Facts Only
* AWS Agent Registry provides a centralized catalog for agents, MCP servers, tools, agent skills, and custom resources.
* AWS Agent Registry utilizes Registries (a catalog with authorization) and Registry Records (metadata describing a resource).
* The workflow involves creating a registry, publishing records for approval, curating and approving records, and allowing consumers to discover approved resources.
* Enterprise readiness includes curation via approval workflows, hybrid search using semantic understanding and keyword matching, MCP-native access via a remote endpoint, and flexible authorization via IAM or JWTs.
* The multi-environment challenge involves agents and tools being deployed across multiple clouds, on-premises infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and enterprise applications, each with its own differing formats for describing resources.
* ARD is an open standard for agent discovery, available at agenticresourcediscovery.org and GitHub.
* ARD enables federation across registries by establishing a common protocol, analogous to DNS.
* ARD allows local registries to federate without requiring bilateral agreements or proprietary connectors.
* ARD complements the AWS Agent Registry by enabling discovery globally while keeping control local.
Executive Summary
Organizations face challenges in discovering and managing AI agentic resources due to the fragmentation of tools across various environments, leading to siloed systems where agents, MCP servers, and tools lack a central catalog. The AWS Agent Registry provides a centralized catalog through Registries and Registry Records, allowing for structured management via approval workflows, hybrid search capabilities, and flexible authorization using IAM or JWTs. This solves discovery within the AWS environment but does not address the multi-environment challenge where resources are spread across different clouds and infrastructure types.
The Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification is proposed as an open standard to address cross-environment discovery, analogous to DNS for name resolution across networks. ARD enables federation across disparate registries by establishing a common protocol so that local catalogs can share discoverability without requiring bespoke connectors or bilateral agreements. This allows for global discovery while maintaining local control over access and curation, positioning ARD as an interoperability layer that complements existing systems like the AWS Agent Registry rather than replacing them.
Full Take
The tension in this narrative lies between centralized control and distributed reality. The existing model, exemplified by AWS Agent Registry, establishes a high-fidelity control plane within a single ecosystem, leveraging established identity and access mechanisms (IAM/JWTs) to enforce discovery boundaries at the point of enforcement. The introduction of ARD addresses the friction caused by system sprawl across heterogeneous environments—a practical constraint that often forces organizations into complex, brittle bilateral integration solutions.
The shift toward an open standard like ARD suggests a necessary evolution from perimeter-based discovery (within AWS) to federation-based discovery across organizational boundaries. This pattern reflects a recognition that technological capability must be decoupled from proprietary infrastructure to achieve true enterprise scale. The implication is that the most effective systems are those that layer interoperability above existing, controlled assets, rather than attempting monolithic migration.
The core systemic implication is that fragmentation dictates operational reality; standardization facilitates architectural freedom. If discovery becomes decoupled via a protocol (ARD), organizations can maintain their localized authority over data and access while simultaneously achieving global visibility. The question that emerges is whether this federation ultimately strengthens the control premise by making distributed discovery transparent, or if the complexity of managing multiple federation points introduces new vectors for failure regarding governance and compliance. What alternative structures exist for federating catalogs that do not rely on the explicit trust granted by proprietary connectors?
Sentinel — Human
The text presents a structured, technically grounded argument about solving agent discovery challenges by proposing an open standard (ARD) that complements existing proprietary systems (AWS Agent Registry).