Restate 1.5 adds some nice QoL improvements for durable execution:

Observability: Full execution history with live timelines showing retries, nested calls, and state changes. All stored locally in RocksDB, no external deps needed.

Better failure handling: Instead of dead-letter queues, you can now pause invocations that hit terminal errors and restart them via UI once you fix the root cause. Invocations retain their progress/state.

Granular retry policies: Configure retries per service/handler. Invocations can pause after max retries instead of failing (useful for config errors, blocked APIs, etc).

Performance: SQL queries 5-20x faster, making the UI much snappier.

AWS Lambda: Automatic payload compression when approaching the 6MB limit, plus new Rust SDK support.

Also includes a docs overhaul with new tutorials for AI agents, workflows, and microservice orchestration.

Cloud version is now public (managed option), or self-host the open source version.