Out of the box, machine-local and LAN workers (via mDNS) are supported, and, yes, the local discovery protocol is effectively just multiprocessing with ser/des taken care of for you (with cloudpickle exclusively, for now). The nice thing is that async semantics are fully preserved, with coroutines and async generators being fully compatible (you can asend(), athrow(), and aclose() to your remote async generators, for example - to the caller it looks like vanilla Python).

Sorry, docs are lax at the moment, but the discovery subpackage has two modules, local.py and lan.py with the implementations. The discovery protocol is easily extensible - no inheritance required, just satisfy the protocol. You could implement a simple discovery publisher that publishes your worker addresses and a subscriber that knows where to look them up - the local implementation uses shared memory to register workers, for example, but it could be anything - a database, message queue, whatever you want.

I'm open to suggestions for a more ergonomic API if you have a specific use case in mind.

Thanks for the show hn tip btw