Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD): An open specification for agent discovery

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:

The workflow is straightforward

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:

This is only the beginning. We’d love your feedback as AWS Agent Registry and our support for open discovery standards evolve.