System and method for using cells as a type of managed container to control the operation of mobile software agents and the run-time invocation and use of services within distributed computing environments. The cell process initially starts out empty containing neither agents nor services. The cell discovers and loads published services at run-time through a look up into a distributed service registry. After loading the service, the cell then publishes availability of the service for use by agents. If an application using agents or an agent desires to make use of a service published and provided by a cell, the application or agent makes a request to the cell to fetch an agent that will invoke the service. Prior to migrating to its new cell, the agent creates a proxy agent that provides a communication channel between the agent running within the cell and the originating agent system. Service status and results are returned through the proxy channel.