Registries
One place to publish, discover, version, and govern the reusable pieces of an agentic system -- skills, tools, MCP servers, and the deployed agents themselves. The practical direction is a single unified index rather than one registry per kind: a catalog of running agents and a package manager for reusable capabilities in the same system.
The Pattern
"As enterprises scale to hundreds or thousands of agents, platform teams face three critical challenges: visibility, control, and reuse." -- AWS (source)
A registry is a single place to publish, discover, version, and govern the reusable pieces of an agentic system -- skills, tools, MCP servers, and the deployed agents themselves. Rather than a separate system per kind, the practical direction is one unified index: AWS's Agent Registry, for instance, stores metadata for every agent, tool, MCP server, and agent skill, with ownership, approval workflows, and hybrid search (AWS).
The need is sharpest for skills, which are built to be reusable but ship with no native distribution: teams copy markdown files between repos -- sometimes within the same repo -- until they sprawl and go stale (AI Native Dev). A registry treats all of these like real software: versioned, discoverable, governed.
Why It Matters
Without a registry, agentic capability fragments and duplicates -- teams rebuild what a neighbour already shipped, nobody can answer "what do we have and who owns it," and compliance risk grows with the sprawl. It is really two jobs in one place: a catalog of running agents (visibility, ownership, retirement) and a package manager for reusable capabilities (skills, tools, MCP servers). It pairs with the MCP gateway, which routes calls to the servers the registry indexes, and it feeds the procedural-memory side of Memory Engineering.
Sources
Last reviewed: 2026-06-24