Register agents

Preview

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Registering an agent turns it into a discoverable service. By publishing your agent's skills, you help other developers and orchestrator agents in your organization find and reuse your work, accelerating overall AI development.

Depending on your agent runtimes, Agent Registry supports two primary registration mechanisms: automatic registration and manual registration.

This document helps you choose the registration mechanism that fits your agent runtimes.

Automatic registration

Supported Google Cloud runtimes register your agents with Agent Registry either by default or through an opt-in deployment step.

Automatic registration is supported for the following Google Cloud runtimes:

• Vertex AI Agent Engine: Agents deployed using the SDK are registered without additional configuration.
• Built-in Google agents: Agents that Google provides directly, such as Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise agents, are discoverable without any configuration.
• Google Kubernetes Engine: Containerized agents deployed to GKE are registered when they include a specific Agent Registry functional type annotation.

The metadata and skills of an agent captured during its registration depend on the agent's protocol:

• Agents implementing the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol: A2A is an open standard that lets agents declare their capabilities and identity. If your agent implements this protocol, Agent Registry automatically extracts the agent's skills from its Agent Card and populates the registry.
• Agents not implementing the A2A protocol: Agent Registry registers the agent, but cannot automatically capture metadata such as the inference URL and skills. To provide this information so your agent is discoverable, use manual registration.

For information about Google Cloud runtimes that support automatic registration, see Use automatic registration.

Manual registration

For agents hosted on external platforms, on-premises, or on Google Cloud runtimes that don't support automatic discovery, you must use manual registration.

To manually register an agent, you use the Agent Registry API to create a Service resource that defines the agent's endpoint and configuration. This writable resource also contains the agent's specific details. After the Service is created, the registry generates a read-only Agent resource that you can use for discovery.

You can manually register two types of agents:

• A2A-compliant agents: Agents that implement the Agent2Agent (A2A) specification (A2A_AGENT_CARD). The registry scans their Agent Card (agent-card.json) endpoint to index their skills.
• Standard REST agents: Remote agents that don't implement the A2A specification (NO_SPEC), such as a standard REST API endpoint.

To learn how to manually register agents, see Use manual registration.