On August 31, AWS made Agent Registry generally available: a private, governed catalog and discovery layer for agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources. Console, CLI, and SDK are in; Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Quick, and Kiro IDE can discover registered capabilities without a context switch.
The Machine Learning Blog states the pain plainly: teams build in isolation with no authoritative inventory, cross-team discovery, or audit trail. The bottleneck moved from running agents to finding and governing them.
[1][2]What GA adds beyond preview
On top of manual/URL records, approval workflows, semantic and keyword search, and CloudTrail, GA brings CloudFormation / Terraform / CDK, tags for cost and access, AWS RAM cross-account sharing, and organization-wide auto-detection that pulls AgentCore Runtime and Gateway agents into a central draft queue instead of waiting for voluntary registration.
Each registry instance also exposes as an MCP server for IDEs—search for a ticket-routing tool without leaving the editor. Five regions ship first: N. Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, Tokyo, Sydney.
[1][2]Split the governance and discovery planes
AWS separates an authoritative governance plane (including drafts, rejects, and policy metadata) from a curated discovery plane that only surfaces approved records for high-throughput search. Record types cover MCP, A2A agent cards, skills, and custom JSON. Customer quotes from Southwest, Syngenta, and Amdocs land on the same beat: from scattered tools with no shared ledger to one catalog the org trusts.
Docs add a hard clock: preview assets under the bedrock-agentcore namespace must migrate to agent-registry by September 17 or lose access—a sharper deadline than the launch blog for teams that already piled records into preview.
Why the urgency now
Once agents leave pilots, departments ship independently. Duplication wastes money; the real risk is not knowing who built what, which systems it touches, or how to shut it down. A registry buys visibility and lifecycle, not magic permissions—identity still needs scoped tokens such as AgentCore Identity. Cloud vendors are no longer selling only another runtime; they are selling control over digital employees already loose in the building.
[2]Take
I read GA as the ID-badge moment for the agent economy: the runtime half is over; the catalog-and-kill-switch half begins. If enterprises treat Registry as a search box without approvals, decommissioning, and identity narrowing, the roster becomes another neglected wiki.
The September 17 namespace migration is a useful stress test—teams willing to move at least know which agents they have on payroll.
[1][2]