[CNCF LFX Proposal] Apicurio Registry: Federated AI Agent Search Across Instances

### CNCF Project

Apicurio Registry

### Term

2026 Term 3 (Sep-Nov)

### Program Name

Federated AI Agent Search Across Instances

### Program Description

## Description
Apicurio Registry is a CNCF Sandbox API and schema registry with built-in Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol support. AI agents register their Agent Cards and can be discovered via well-known endpoints. But in organizations with multiple registry instances (per team, per environment), there's no way to search for agents across all of them from one place.

This project adds a federation layer: a registry instance can register peers and fan out agent card queries across all of them, returning merged results. The mentee will implement the peer registration API, the federated search endpoint, a UI page for managing peers and browsing agents, and graceful handling of unavailable peers. Integration tests use Testcontainers to spin up multiple registry instances.

## Expected outcomes
- Peer registration API (add/remove/list remote registry instances)
- Federated search endpoint that queries all peers and returns unified results
- "Remote Registries" page in the React UI
- Partial results when peers are unavailable (timeouts, clear error reporting)
- Integration tests verifying cross-instance agent search

### Technologies

Java, Quarkus, React, TypeScript, REST, Testcontainers

### Skills same as Technologies?

- [x] Yes, the required skills are the same as the technologies listed above.

### Required/Desirable Skills

_No response_

### Mentors

Carles Arnal | @carlesarnal | carnalca@ibm.com | carnalca
Eric Wittmann | @EricWittmann | ewittman@ibm.com | ewittman

### Upstream Issue URL

https://github.com/Apicurio/apicurio-registry/issues/8424

### Application Prerequisites

- [x] Resume
- [x] Cover Letter
- [ ] School Enrollment Verification
- [ ] Participation Permission from school or employer
- [ ] Coding Challenge
- [ ] Custom Prerequisite (fill in details below)

### Coding Challenge URL

_No response_

### Custom Prerequisite Name

_No response_

### Custom Prerequisite Description

_No response_

### Custom Prerequisite — File Upload

- [ ] Yes — completion of this task requires the mentee to submit a file.

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**LFX program:** [CNCF - Apicurio Registry: Federated AI Agent Search Across Instances (2026 Term 3)](https://mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/project/06ed3695-1b51-4166-a1df-0131887ec4fb)

Start by reading upstream issue #8424 and the Apicurio Registry repository to map the existing agent-card endpoints, registry APIs, React UI, and integration-test setup. Done means peer registration, federated search with partial results for unavailable peers, a Remote Registries page, and Testcontainers coverage across multiple registry instances.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.