Managing AI agents at scale is the new big challenge for companies
Managing AI agents at scale is one of the biggest challenges companies face today. As organizations expand their AI operations, the number of agents multiplies rapidly, and that is where the problem begins: nobody knows exactly which agents exist, who created them, whether they have been approved for use, or if someone on another team already built exactly the same thing you are about to develop from scratch.
It is the classic silent chaos that keeps growing behind the scenes.
And the scenario gets even more complicated when those agents are spread across different environments, some running on AWS, others on different clouds, and then there are the ones sitting in the company’s own on-premises environment. Without a centralized view, governance falls apart.
That is exactly the problem Amazon set out to solve with the AWS Agent Registry, now available in preview within Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The pitch is straightforward: a single place to discover, share, and reuse AI agents, tools, and skills across the entire organization, regardless of where they were created or hosted. 🚀
In the sections ahead, we are going to break down what is already available, how it works in practice, and where this product is headed.
What is AWS Agent Registry and why it matters right now
The AWS Agent Registry is, in practice, a centralized catalog of artificial intelligence agents. Think of it as a living repository where teams across an organization can register, catalog, and look up every agent that already exists, regardless of the framework used to build them or the environment where they are running. That means an agent built with LangChain, another with CrewAI, and a third one with Amazon Bedrock Agents itself can all coexist in the same registry, discoverable and reusable by any team in the company that has the necessary permissions to access them.
The problem this product solves is deeper than it might seem at first glance. When a company starts scaling AI usage at an accelerated pace, the natural tendency is for each team to build its own agents in isolation, with no visibility into what other departments have already developed. The result is a fragmented environment full of redundancies, where different teams spend time and money recreating solutions that already exist somewhere else in the company.
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With the centralized agent management that AWS Agent Registry proposes, this waste can be eliminated in a structured way, because tool discovery stops depending on informal conversations between teams and gets a dedicated infrastructure instead.
Another point that puts this launch on the radar of large organizations is the question of compliance and traceability. In regulated environments, knowing exactly which agent made which decision, who approved its use, and which version was in production at a given moment is not optional — it is a requirement. AWS Agent Registry was designed with that in mind, offering rich metadata associated with each registered agent, which makes audits, security reviews, and maintaining a clear history of each agent’s lifecycle within the organization much easier.
What is already available in the preview
The registry stores metadata for each agent, tool, MCP server, agent skill, and custom resources as a structured record. It captures who published each record, which protocols are implemented, what is exposed, and how to invoke that resource. Native support for standards like MCP and A2A comes built in, but the platform also allows defining custom schemas according to the specific needs of each organization.
There are two main ways to register a resource. The first is to provide metadata manually, whether through the console, the AWS SDK, or directly via the API. In that case, you specify capability descriptions, ownership, compliance status, and usage documentation. The second way is more automated: just point to an MCP or A2A endpoint, and the registry automatically pulls all the relevant information. That means your catalog can reflect your entire agent landscape from day one, not just the parts running on AWS.
Access to the registry happens through the AgentCore console, via APIs, and also as an MCP server. Any MCP-compatible client can query it directly, including tools like Kiro and Claude Code. For organizations that use custom identity providers, OAuth-based access lets teams build their own discovery interfaces without needing IAM credentials. 💡
How tool discovery works in practice
Tool discovery within AWS Agent Registry works through a structured registration system, where each cataloged agent or skill carries a standardized set of information: name, description, owner, approval status, version, access endpoints, and the capabilities that agent offers. This standardization is what makes it possible for other agents, and humans too, to quickly find what they need without relying on documentation scattered across wikis and outdated spreadsheets.
The search mechanism is a technical highlight of the product. The registry uses a hybrid approach that combines keyword search with semantic matching. In practice, all queries use keyword matching, but longer, natural language queries also activate semantic understanding to surface conceptually related results. A search for payment processing, for example, might return tools tagged as billing or invoicing, even if they have completely different names. Discovery becomes the path of least resistance: the team searches the registry first, and if an approved capability already exists, they use it. If it does not exist, they build it, register it, and make it available to everyone.
An important technical detail is that AWS Agent Registry does not require agents to be hosted exclusively on AWS in order to be registered. Agents running on other clouds or in on-premises environments can also be cataloged, which directly addresses the hybrid infrastructure scenario that is the reality for most large enterprises. In practice, the registry works as an abstraction layer that decouples where the agent lives from how it can be found and accessed, allowing the organization to have a unified view even in a technologically diverse environment.
Beyond passive discovery, where a team browses the catalog to see what already exists, AWS Agent Registry also enables active discovery by other agents. This is especially relevant in multi-agent architectures, where an orchestrator agent needs to identify and call on other specialized agents to complete a complex task. With the registry available as a source of truth, this process of dynamically composing capabilities becomes much more reliable and scalable than the manual approaches teams were improvising before. 🤖
What real companies are saying
Zuora, an AI-focused monetization and revenue management platform that operates around 50 agents distributed across Sales, Finance, Product, and Engineering teams, highlighted that AWS Agent Registry gives their principal architects a unified view to discover, manage, and catalog every agent, tool, and skill in use. The centralized approach lets teams find and reuse existing assets instead of rebuilding them from scratch. Standardized metadata ensures every agent includes consistent details about ownership and capabilities, providing end-to-end visibility and accountability across the entire agent ecosystem.
Southwest Airlines is implementing an enterprise-wide agent catalog with organization-wide governance. For the airline, AWS Agent Registry solves the critical discovery challenge, enabling teams to find and reuse existing agents instead of rebuilding capabilities from scratch. With managed governance across multiple platforms, every agent carries standardized ownership metadata and policy enforcement, preventing uncontrolled agent sprawl while laying the foundation to scale thousands of agents with enterprise-grade governance from day one.
Agent governance: the heart of the proposal
If there is one theme that runs through the entire AWS Agent Registry proposal, it is agent governance. And we are not talking about governance in the bureaucratic sense of the word, but about having real controls over who can create agents, who can approve them, who can consume them, and how that lifecycle is managed over time. In companies with dozens of teams developing agents in parallel, the absence of governance is not just an operational issue — it represents a concrete risk to security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
AWS Agent Registry addresses this with an integrated approval model, where agents go through defined stages throughout their lifecycle: they start as drafts, move to pending approval, and become discoverable by the broader organization only after being approved. This structure allows security and architecture teams to play an active role in the process, validating agents before they are widely adopted across the organization, without creating unnecessary bottlenecks in the development workflow. The idea is for governance to be an enabler, not an obstacle.
Another relevant aspect of the agent governance offered by the product is granular permission management via IAM policies. Administrators define who can register agents, tools, and skills, and who can discover them. Not every agent needs to be available to the entire organization, and AWS Agent Registry allows defining very specific scopes of visibility and access. An agent developed for a highly sensitive context, such as financial data processing or health information, can have its access restricted to authorized teams only, while general-purpose agents remain more broadly available.
Records are versioned to track changes over time, and organizations can deprecate records that are no longer in use. The registry also offers hooks to integrate with approval workflows that already exist in the company, and custom metadata can be added to each entry, capturing information like team ownership, compliance status, or deployment environment. This flexibility is what makes the product viable for large and complex organizations, where the needs of different departments are very distinct from one another.
What to expect from AWS Agent Registry in the coming months
The product is still in preview, which means some planned features are not yet available to all users. AWS has signaled that the roadmap points toward a future where the registry spans every AWS service where agents are built, including Amazon Q and Kiro. The goal is for agents to be automatically indexed the moment they are deployed. Developers will search directly from their IDE, business users will discover agents in their workspace, and administrators will govern through the console — all backed by the same source of truth.
Registry federation will allow connecting multiple catalogs and searching across them as if they were one. Organizations will be able to define categories and taxonomies that reflect how they think about their agents, backed by structured metadata schemas that capture ownership, compliance status, cost center, and any other information the governance model requires.
Over time, operational intelligence from AgentCore Observability will surface alongside registry entries: invocation counts, latency, uptime, and usage patterns, helping teams understand not just what exists, but what is actually working in production. Additionally, AWS is working to connect the registry with external partner catalogs, centralizing discovery and governance across the company’s entire technology landscape.
The launch of AWS Agent Registry arrives at a moment when the artificial intelligence market is clearly transitioning from an experimentation phase to an at-scale operationalization phase. Companies that establish a solid foundation for agent governance and discovery earliest will have a real advantage when it comes to scaling their AI initiatives with security and efficiency. And that is exactly the space where AWS Agent Registry positions itself as a central piece of Amazon’s strategy for the enterprise AI market.
Availability and supported regions
The AWS Agent Registry is available in preview today through AgentCore in five AWS regions:
- US East (N. Virginia)
- US West (Oregon)
- Asia Pacific (Sydney)
- Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
- Europe (Ireland)
Access is available through the AgentCore console, and the official documentation is already live for anyone who wants to explore the technical details of the product. For teams scaling their AI agent operations, it is worth keeping a close eye on the registry’s evolution over the coming months, especially the observability integrations and catalog federation. 🎯
