AWS has introduced Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), an open specification designed to streamline the discovery of AI agents and tools across different environments. The initiative addresses the challenges organizations face when managing a growing number of agents, MCP servers, and tools without a centralized catalog. Developers often struggle to locate, vet, and connect resources manually, leading to inefficiencies. ARD aims to solve this by enabling a standardized approach to resource discovery.
ARD is an open standard, not a product or a single registry, and is available under the Apache License 2.0 at agenticresourcediscovery.org and on GitHub. AWS contributed feedback during the development of the specification. The specification is intended to enable federation across registries, similar to how the Domain Name System (DNS) enables name resolution across networks. With ARD, organizations can deploy agents across environments, and each environment’s catalog can surface these resources in a common protocol, behind an endpoint.
The AWS Agent Registry provides a centralized catalog for agents, MCP servers, tools, agent skills, and custom resources. It is built around two core concepts: Registries and Registry Records. Registries are catalogs created in AWS accounts with authorization configurations, while Registry Records represent individual resources, capturing metadata that describes what they are, what they do, and how to reach them.
Source: awsml
