Remote Agents

Route tasks between remote agents over HTTP with durable RPC calls.

When agents need to scale independently, run on different infrastructure, or be developed by different teams, you can deploy them as separate Restate services and route requests between them. Restate makes cross-service calls look like local function calls while providing end-to-end durability, failure recovery, and automatic retries.

Local vs remote agents

There are two ways to coordinate specialist agents:

	Local agents	Remote agents
Where they run	Same process as the router	Separate services, potentially on different infrastructure
Best for	Simple specialization with shared context	Independent scaling, isolation, different languages
How routing works	Handoffs, sub-agents, or tool calls within one handler	Durable RPC calls between Restate services
Example	LLM picks a specialist prompt, calls LLM again in the same handler	LLM picks a specialist service, router calls it over HTTP

Agent SDKs like OpenAI and Google ADK have built-in mechanisms for local routing (handoffs, sub-agents). For remote routing, or when using the Restate SDK directly, you deploy each specialist as its own Restate service and call it via Restate’s service clients.

You can either use typed service clients or call a remote service by string name (generic calls). Learn more about calling services in the TS/Py SDK documentation.

Example: routing to specialist agents

For more details on resilient service-to-service calls, see the SDK documentation: TypeScript / Python.