Distributed Async/Await on Hello, Agent! Ep. 2
April 14. Register early to get first access when the episode drops.
Distributed Async/Await is the programming model. Agent reliability is the test.
On April 14, I am joining Alexander Gallego on Episode 2 of Redpanda's *Hello, Agent!* podcast to talk about both.
Register: https://www.redpanda.com/events/hello-agent-ep2-distributed-async-await
Most people frame agent reliability as a problem at the edges. Retries. Timeouts. A queue or two. That framing is comfortable. It is also why so many agentic systems fall over the moment they leave the demo.
An agent is a distributed program. Its work spans processes, machines, networks, and time. Once you accept that, the question stops being "how do I make my agent reliable" and starts being "what is the right programming model for distributed computation." That question has a good answer. It is not a new one.
Async/await let us write concurrent code that reads like sequential code. Distributed Async/Await extends the same idea across failure domains. The function suspends. The runtime is responsible for resuming it — same machine, different machine, an hour later, a week later, after a crash, after a deploy. The programming model does not change. The execution model carries the weight.
Possible topics we might cover:
What "distributed" actually adds to async/await — and why the addition is not cosmetic.
Designing for reliability when work spans services, queues, and failure domains you do not control.
Failure handling that does not turn the application into a graveyard of defensive code.
Why agent reliability and workflow reliability are, in the end, the same problem.
If you have ever written a workflow that looked clean on a whiteboard and then spent a week chasing partial failures in production — this one is for you.
Reliability is not a feature you bolt on. It is a property of the programming model you chose.
April 14. Register early to get first access when the episode drops.