Dynamic connections are connections that are established at runtime through discovery rather than hardwired at deployment time. Instead of an agent knowing the exact address of every tool or service it might need, it queries a registry or catalog to find available capabilities that match its current requirements. The registry returns a match, the connection is established, and the agent proceeds. If the registry’s contents change—new tools appear, old ones retire, better alternatives become available—the agent’s behavior adapts automatically without anyone touching its configuration.
This is the connection pattern that makes agentic systems evolvable. In a point-to-point world, every new capability requires reconfiguring every component that might use it. In a dynamic connection world, new capabilities register themselves and become immediately available to any agent that asks. This difference might seem like a minor architectural convenience in small systems, but it becomes a strategic advantage as agent portfolios grow into the dozens or hundreds of components that characterize real enterprise deployments.
How Dynamic Connections Work
Dynamic connections depend on an intermediary—a registry, catalog, or directory service—that maintains a current inventory of available components and their capabilities. The interaction follows a lookup-then-connect pattern. An agent determines that it needs a capability (a tool that can query a specific database, an agent that specializes in a particular domain, a service that provides a certain function). It queries the registry with a description of what it needs. The registry returns one or more matches, along with the connection information needed to reach them. The agent selects the best match, establishes a connection, and proceeds with the interaction.
The registry itself is a platform-level component that components register with and agents query against. Registration involves a component describing its capabilities—what it does, what inputs it accepts, what outputs it produces, what protocols it supports—in a structured format that the registry can index and match against queries. Deregistration happens when a component is retired or becomes unavailable. In well-designed registries, health checking ensures that the registry’s inventory reflects current reality rather than stale configuration.
What distinguishes dynamic connections from point-to-point connections is the indirection. The agent doesn’t know at design time which specific component it will connect to. It knows what it needs, and the registry resolves that need to a specific endpoint at runtime. This indirection is the source of both the pattern’s power (flexibility, evolvability, loose coupling) and its complexity (registry availability, match quality, latency overhead).
Discovery in the MCP Ecosystem
The Model Context Protocol ecosystem provides one of the most concrete illustrations of dynamic connections in agentic systems. MCP servers register themselves with their capabilities—the tools they expose, the resources they provide, the prompts they support. MCP clients (typically agents or agent runtimes) query these registries to discover what’s available. When an agent needs a tool that can create JIRA tickets, it doesn’t need a hardwired connection to a specific JIRA MCP server—it can discover one through the registry.
This pattern enables a plug-and-play architecture for agent capabilities. A new MCP server that provides access to a previously unavailable system—a legacy database, a specialized analytics platform, a niche compliance tool—can register itself and become immediately available to every agent in the environment. No agent reconfiguration required. No deployment cycles. The new capability appears in the registry, and agents that need it find it.
The same principle applies beyond MCP. API catalogs, service meshes, and agent registries all implement variations of the dynamic connection pattern. An orchestrator that discovers available specialist agents through a registry is using dynamic connections. An agent platform that resolves tool requests against a capabilities catalog is using dynamic connections. The specific technology varies, but the pattern is consistent: advertise capabilities, discover capabilities, connect at runtime.
The Benefits of Indirection
Dynamic connections offer several architectural benefits that become increasingly valuable as systems grow.
Loose coupling is the most fundamental. When agents discover tools through a registry rather than connecting to specific endpoints, neither side depends on the other’s identity. A tool can be replaced by a better alternative without changing any agent configuration. An agent can be redeployed in a new environment with different tools available and adapt automatically. This decoupling enables independent evolution of components—teams can build, deploy, and retire tools without coordinating with every team that might use them.
Dynamic composition allows agent capabilities to change without redeployment. When a new tool registers itself, agents gain access to it immediately. When a tool is deregistered, agents that were using it can discover alternatives. This is particularly valuable in enterprise environments where the landscape of available services changes regularly—new APIs come online, legacy systems are retired, third-party integrations are added and removed.
Load balancing and failover become possible when registries track multiple instances of the same capability. If three MCP servers all provide customer data access, the registry can distribute requests across them or route around a failed instance. This kind of resilience is impossible with point-to-point connections, where a failed endpoint means a failed connection with no automatic alternative.
Governance through visibility is an underappreciated benefit. A registry that tracks all available capabilities and all discovery queries provides a centralized view of what’s available in the system and what’s being used. This visibility supports capacity planning, cost allocation, security auditing, and compliance reporting—all of which are essential in enterprise environments.
The Challenges of Indirection
Dynamic connections are not free. The indirection they introduce creates challenges that don’t exist in simpler connection patterns.
Registry availability becomes a critical dependency. If the registry is down, no new connections can be established. Agents that need to discover capabilities are stuck. This makes the registry itself a single point of failure that requires high-availability design, redundancy, and careful operational management. The irony of decoupling everything through a registry is that the registry itself becomes the most tightly coupled component in the system.
Match quality determines whether agents get the right capabilities. A registry that returns irrelevant results—a tool that sort of matches the query but doesn’t actually do what’s needed—wastes time and degrades agent performance. Effective registries need rich capability descriptions, semantic matching, and quality signals (usage statistics, reliability ratings, certification status) to ensure that discovery produces useful results.
Latency overhead is unavoidable. Every dynamic connection requires at least one registry query before the actual interaction can begin. In systems where discovery happens frequently, this overhead adds up. Caching strategies help—an agent can cache recently discovered endpoints and reuse them without querying the registry again—but caching introduces its own challenges around staleness and invalidation.
Governance complexity increases because the connection topology is no longer visible in static configuration. When connections are established at runtime, answering questions like “what does this agent have access to?” requires querying the registry and analyzing discovery patterns rather than simply reading a configuration file. Runtime connection auditing, access control at the registry level, and discovery logging become essential governance tools.
Dynamic Connections and Agent Autonomy
Dynamic connections have an interesting relationship with agent autonomy. An agent that discovers its own tools at runtime is exercising a degree of autonomy over its own capabilities—choosing which tools to use based on the current situation rather than operating with a fixed set of pre-configured resources.
This capability selection autonomy can be valuable. An agent handling a customer request in an unusual language might discover a specialized translation tool that it wouldn’t normally use. An agent facing an unexpected data format might discover a conversion tool that its designers hadn’t anticipated. Dynamic connections give agents the ability to adapt their toolkit to the situation at hand.
But this same flexibility creates governance concerns. If agents can discover and connect to any registered tool, how do you ensure they only access tools they’re authorized to use? The answer lies in registry-level access control—governing not just what’s registered but who’s allowed to discover and connect to what. A registry that exposes everything to every agent is a security liability. A registry that applies role-based access control to discovery queries ensures that agents only find capabilities they’re authorized to use.
When to Use Dynamic Connections
Dynamic connections are the right choice when the system needs to evolve without reconfiguration, when the set of available capabilities is expected to change over time, or when multiple instances of the same capability need to be load-balanced or failed over.
Growing tool ecosystems are a natural fit. When an enterprise is adding new MCP servers, new API integrations, or new agent capabilities on a regular basis, dynamic connections ensure that existing agents benefit from new capabilities without redeployment.
Multi-tenant or multi-environment deployments benefit from dynamic connections because the same agents can discover environment-specific tools in each deployment. An agent deployed in the US environment discovers US-specific compliance tools. The same agent deployed in the EU environment discovers GDPR-specific tools. The agent code is identical; only the registry contents differ.
Platform architectures where multiple teams contribute tools and agents benefit from the loose coupling that dynamic connections provide. Each team registers its components independently, and the platform’s discovery infrastructure handles the wiring at runtime.
The general principle: use dynamic connections when you value flexibility and evolvability over simplicity, and when the overhead of registry infrastructure is justified by the scale and dynamism of the system.
Dynamic Connections vs. Other Connection Types
Dynamic connections occupy the middle ground between the simplicity of point-to-point connections and the resilience of queued connections.
Point-to-point connections are direct links between known endpoints. They’re simpler and faster but rigid and tightly coupled.
Dynamic connections use registries to resolve capabilities to endpoints at runtime. They’re flexible and loosely coupled but introduce registry dependency and latency.
Queued connections use message infrastructure to decouple senders and receivers in time. They’re resilient to availability mismatches but add buffering complexity.
Dynamic connections solve a different problem than queued connections. Dynamic connections answer the question “who should I talk to?” Queued connections answer the question “what if they’re not available right now?” In practice, these patterns often compose: an agent might use a dynamic connection to discover the right queue to send a message to, combining discovery with buffering.
Also Known As
Dynamic connections appear under various names depending on the platform and context. You’ll encounter them as discovery-based connections (emphasizing the runtime lookup), registry-mediated connections (emphasizing the intermediary), service discovery (in microservices and cloud-native contexts), capability discovery (in agent-specific contexts), or catalog-based routing (in API management contexts). The original agentic primitives framework referred to this pattern as discovery as a connection type. In the MCP ecosystem, the concept maps to MCP registries and tool discovery. The defining characteristic across all terminology is the same: connections established at runtime through intermediary lookup rather than static configuration.
Key Takeaways
Dynamic connections enable agentic systems that evolve without reconfiguration by introducing registries and catalogs that resolve capability needs to specific endpoints at runtime. They provide loose coupling, dynamic composition, and the ability for new components to become available instantly—but they require registry infrastructure, governance for discovery access control, and strategies for managing the latency and availability implications of indirection. In the agentic primitives framework, dynamic connections sit alongside point-to-point connections and queued connections as the three patterns that define how components find and communicate with each other, and they are the pattern most directly tied to building agentic systems that grow and adapt over time.