AWS Drops an Agent Registry Into AgentCore Preview — and It's Actually Cloud-Agnostic

AWS has quietly put its agent registry where enterprises can actually use it.

The company announced AWS Agent Registry this week, embedded in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, now in preview across five regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland). The pitch is direct: as organizations deploy hundreds or thousands of agents, platform teams lose visibility, can't govern who publishes what, and end up rebuilding the same capabilities over and over. AgentCore Registry is AWS's answer — a centralized catalog for discovery, reuse, and lifecycle governance across an enterprise's entire agent landscape.

What's notable is the scope. The registry indexes metadata for agents, tools, MCP servers, agent skills, and custom resources regardless of where they're hosted. On AWS, other cloud providers, on premises. That cloud-agnostic framing is deliberate. "No organization's agent landscape lives entirely within one provider," the AWS blog notes. The registry reflects that reality rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

The technical design backs that up. Records support MCP and A2A natively, with custom schemas available for org-specific needs. You can register manually through the console, SDK, or API, or point the registry at an MCP/A2A endpoint and let it pull in details automatically. It's also queryable as an MCP server itself — any MCP-compatible client, including Kiro and Claude Code, can hit it directly. OAuth-based access means teams can build custom discovery UIs without requiring IAM credentials.

On governance, AWS built in a publishing workflow: records start as drafts, move to pending approval, and only become organization-wide discoverable once approved. IAM policies control who can register and who can consume. Records are versioned and support deprecation — a full lifecycle, not just a name-and-description listing.

The two named design partners give the announcement concrete weight. Zuora, an AI-first monetization and revenue management platform, is running 50 agents across Sales, Finance, Product, and Developer teams. Chief Product and Technology Officer Pete Hirsch called the registry a way to "find and reuse existing assets rather than rebuilding from scratch" with standardized metadata for ownership and capabilities. Southwest Airlines is using it to build an enterprise-wide catalog with managed governance across multiple platforms — every agent carrying standardized ownership metadata and policy enforcement, with an explicit goal of scaling to thousands of agents. VP AI and Intelligent Platforms Justin Bundick put a point on the sprawl problem: "prevent agent sprawl across the organization while establishing the foundation for scaling thousands of agents with enterprise-grade governance from day one."

Where AWS is headed tells you what the company thinks the pain point actually is. Agents built using AgentCore, Amazon Quick Suite, and Kiro will auto-index into the registry on deployment. Developers will search from the IDE, business users in their workspace, admins from the console. Cross-registry federation is on the roadmap — connecting multiple registries and querying across them as one logical system. Operational intelligence from AgentCore Observability will surface invocation counts, latency, uptime, and usage patterns alongside registry records. And AWS is signaling interest in connecting to external partner catalogs, though details are thin.

Agent sprawl is the operative framing. It's a real enterprise problem — the same capability built by three different teams, agents deployed without anyone knowing they exist, no lifecycle management as they age out. Whether Agent Registry actually solves that depends on whether enterprises adopt the approval workflows seriously rather than routing around them. But the technical primitives are there: standards-native, cloud-agnostic on metadata, accessible programmatically. That's a real foundation.

AWS Agent Registry in AgentCore preview is available now in the five listed regions. Getting started links point to the AgentCore Console and documentation.