Techniques for creating a persistent connection between client devices and one or more remote computing resources, which may form a portion of a network-accessible computing platform. This connection may be considered “permanent” or “nearly permanent” to allow the client device to both send data to and receive data from the remote resources at nearly any time. In addition, both the client device and the remote resources may establish virtual channels over this single connection. If no data is exchanged between the client device and the remote computing resources for a threshold amount of time, then the connection may be severed and the client device may attempt to establish a new connection with the remote computing resources.