Restate has released version 1.7, and the headline change is Flow Control, backed by Virtual Queues. Read Restate’s announcement here.
For customers whose integrations run on Restate Cloud, this gives the runtime a way to throttle, prioritise and queue work before it hits your services, agents or downstream systems. Think of it as a smart traffic light: it can slow a flood of events for one brand, reserve capacity for another, or cap how many calls one team sends to an AI gateway or constrained API. Rules can be set by organisation, team or user, and updated on the fly through the admin API.
How we are responding
We are enabling the new scheduler on our non-production Restate environments to test how Flow Control behaves with the workloads we run for customers. We expect to use it first where traffic is spiky or where one integration could crowd out another, such as multi-brand Shopify order flows or APIs with tight rate limits. We are also reviewing the new tracing spans for long-running flows so our runbooks and Kori monitoring stay aligned with the updated trace format.
What it means for you
Restate 1.7 is opt-in today, and the new scheduler is production-ready. If your integrations are on Restate Cloud, the upgrade does not happen automatically and we will manage the timing with you.
A few things to note:
- Virtual Queues currently require a fresh Restate cluster. Restate expects migration support for existing clusters in an upcoming patch release.
- Some dashboards or alerts that rely on old tracing span names will need adjusting.
- Reliability and UI improvements, including adaptive failure detection and a cleaner overview for high-scale workloads, come along for the ride.
If your integrations run on Restate Cloud, ask us when Flow Control makes sense for your workloads, or read what is included in our Inite Care Plan.
