A method for offloading services of a sewer application in a network system. The method includes receiving, by a first in-network computation offload instance, a first request packet from a client application, wherein the first request packet includes a first application payload for processing by the server application; generating, by the first instance, a modified request packet that includes the first application payload and first offload information that describes the first instance for use by the server application in coordinating offloading processing to one or more in-network computation offload instances; and transmitting, by the first instance, the modified request packet to the next device in the traffic flow between the client application and the server application, wherein the next device is either (1) a second in-network computation offload instance in the traffic flow between the client application and the server application or (2) the sewer application.