PROPOSAL: For Agent Discovery via Registry: Proposing UnityCatalog

[everettVT]

Unity Catalog is an open source data catalog that has been widely adopted within the Enterpirse Data Engineering Community.

It interfaces well with Iceberg Catalogs, MLFlow, and supports registering "AI" Functions.

www.github.com/unitycatalog/unitycatalog

[ognis1205]

Since the lifecycle of entities stored in a Catalog and a Registry typically differs, and considering the need for high availability, I believe that a REST Data Catalog like Unity Catalog (OSS) is not well-suited for this use case.

[vishalmysore]

Yes, I agree—the lifecycle and operational requirements of AgentCards differ significantly from traditional cataloged entities, making a REST-based Data Catalog like Unity Catalog (even OSS versions) less suitable for this use case. AgentCards often represent active, dynamic agents with capabilities and context that may change in real time, requiring low-latency updates, fast discovery, and immediate consistency—whereas catalogs are optimized for relatively static metadata, versioning, and governance over longer-lived assets like datasets or models. Additionally, registries intended for agent coordination often need built-in support for real-time subscription, health checks, and distributed availability, which Unity Catalog lacks. So while it can be used for persistence or archival, it falls short as a primary registry for active agent orchestration.

[c-mysec]

Maybe agents will have bookmarks of URLs like '/.well-known/agent.json', just like we have our favorite bakery, supermarket, or clothing store.
And maybe we'll have systems for advertising (yellow pages) or searching for agents.
If an agent wants to recommend another, it will share their '/.well-known/agent.json' URL.

lol

[everettVT]

Very good points here. When I initially wrote the issue, I was less familiar with A2A's role a primary responsibility within an agent stack.

Seeing that, as far as A2A is concerned, agents are purely defined in their configuration json, source control should be sufficient.

[xtrasmal]

The only registry would be through auto discovery within a mesh network. Agents are not Apps, they are processes.

Agents do not exist until a task is planned by another process. This process will gather resources, tools, etc needed and dynamically will spawn several Agents to do specific subtasks. When all is done, the whole is disposed.

Just saying there will not be anything to register.

[everettVT]

Thanks for your input here. After becoming more familiar with the primary responsibility of A2A agent cards, it's more obvious to me that these configurations are better suited for version control.

I'm glad we got to clear this question quickly.