Restate

Restate develops a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes. The system combines durable execution (workflows-as-code), consistent key-value state via "Virtual Objects," and reliable communication with exactly-once semantics, so that application code automatically resumes from the last completed step after crashes or infrastructure failures. Additional primitives include durable promises/futures and timers, suspension of long-running code while awaiting promises, flow control with per-scope concurrency limits, and built-in observability through a UI, CLI, and automatically generated OpenTelemetry traces.

The runtime is implemented in Rust and ships as a self-contained single binary with no external dependencies; users can start with one node and scale out to a highly available cluster with fast failover. Applications are written using SDKs for TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, and Rust, and can be deployed to servers, containers, or function-as-a-service platforms including AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Functions, Deno Deploy, Knative, and Kubernetes. Stated performance characteristics on the company site are sub-100ms p99 latency for 10-step workflow completions and 13,000 workflows per second on a three-node cluster.

Typical use cases described by the company are durable AI agents, workflows such as user signup, payment and order processing, microservice orchestration, event processing, async task queues, stateful actors and state machines. The core server is distributed under a source-available Business Source License; SDK repositories are MIT-licensed. Restate also maintains examples, AI examples, a Kubernetes operator, a web UI, and a plugin providing skills and context for AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.

Founding story

After roughly 13 years working on Apache Flink, Stephan Ewen observed that users repeatedly repurposed Flink for transactional, orchestration-style use cases because they could not find a better-suited tool. He and co-founders Igal Shilman and Till Rohrmann started Restate to address that gap, combining stream-processing ideas from Flink with the workflows-as-code concept on a specialized event log, and generalizing it into a programming model based on durable execution, virtual objects, and durable promises.

Business model

Open-core/source-available software: the Restate server and CLI are freely available as a source-available BSL-licensed single binary for self-hosting, alongside a commercial managed offering, Restate Cloud, and a bring-your-own-cloud deployment option. At the time of the 1.0 launch, Restate Cloud was in free early access and the company stated it had not yet settled on a monetization model.

Monetization is centered on hosted and managed deployments (Restate Cloud and bring-your-own-cloud) rather than the self-hosted open runtime; at the June 2024 launch the cloud service was free during early access while pricing was being determined.

Traction

The core GitHub repository had approximately 4,320 stars, 198 forks, and 4,141 commits as of August 2026, with 83 public repositories in the organization and satellite projects such as the examples repo (168 stars) and AI examples repo (85 stars). Published customer statements describe production usage, including a founding engineer at a health-tech startup saying Restate handles over 90% of production workloads, and testimonials from Rhize, Cinder, Advisoa, and Edge Delta engineers.

Latest developments

The company's homepage announces Restate Bring-your-own-Cloud, described as private, secure, and up to 10x cheaper than alternatives. Product scope has broadened toward AI agents, with dedicated AI examples, recipes, and tutorials, plus SDKs now covering TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, and Rust and a plugin for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. GitHub activity across the organization was recorded through August 2026.