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.

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