This post discusses the stateless microservice design pattern; it is meant as support material for other posts of mine that discuss microservices, mainly michael.gr - The Stateful Microservice.
Is statelessness a requirement for a microservice?
In another post (see michael.gr - So, what is a Microservice, anyway?) I examine what a microservice really is, and I come to the conclusion that from a purely technical standpoint, a working definition could be as simple as this:
A microservice is a scalable and resilient module.
Even if you disagree with the terseness of this definition, and you regard microservices as necessarily more than that, I hope you will at least agree that it is precisely scalability and resilience that statelessness in microservices aims to address, so this definition serves its purpose at least in the context of this series of posts.
There are many who will try to convince you that in order to build a scalable and resilient system, you need statelessness; so much so, that microservices have almost come to be regarded as synonymous with statelessness. This post examines whether this is that in fact so, and what is the cost of doing things this way.
