Agent Registry — References

The service-discovery literature this problem inherits from, plus the description formats entries are built on.

Discovery and resolution

• Service Registry pattern — the canonical statement of the problem, including the availability argument for client-side caching of registry data.
• Kubernetes service discovery — DNS-based resolution with health-gated endpoints, the model most infrastructure teams already have in place.
• Consul and etcd — widely deployed registries with health checking and watch-based change propagation. Named without links, as their documentation paths have been reorganised more than once.

Describing an entry

• OpenAPI Specification — the precedent for machine-readable interface description separate from human documentation.
• Semantic Versioning — the convention that makes a resolution constraint such as "this major revision" expressible at all.
• Model Context Protocol — defines how a client enumerates what a server offers, which is the discovery half of this capability for protocol-native deployments.

Cataloguing for people

• Backstage — software catalogue with ownership, lifecycle state, and relationship metadata; the closest established prior art for the governance fields an agent entry needs.

No verified reference is recorded for agent-specific registry schemas. Published work in this area is vendor documentation rather than specification, and is listed in the stack note.