TL;DR: AI agents face the same discovery problem microservices solved with service registries a decade ago, except agents need semantic search, governance workflows, and dynamic capability updates. AWS Agent Registry (preview) implements this pattern as a managed service. I tested it end-to-end: create a registry, register skills, approve them, and discover via natural language queries. The code and gotchas are below.

The Problem We Already Solved Once

In 2012, Netflix open-sourced Eureka [1]. The problem it solved was simple to state and hard to live without: in a microservices architecture, you can’t hardcode where services live. Instances spin up and down. IP addresses change. New capabilities appear. Old ones get deprecated. Without a registry, every service needs to know the exact location of every other service it depends on. That doesn’t scale.