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.