Essential Guide

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Editor's note

What are the biggest challenges regarding application state management? How much harder is it to deal with state in distributed architectures? What are the intricate differences between managing stateful and stateless services -- not to mention making them work together? What are the tools that can help you keep state management on point?

Find the answers to these questions in this guide. Inside, you will find expert articles that cover key state management topics, such as the opposing consequences of front-end and back-end state management, and how state-centric can help bolster both microservices and serverless architectures.

Whether you're just getting acquainted with application state management or have been grappling with it for some time, use this guide to hone your skills and develop state management strategies.

1Managing and controlling state

Application state management involves dozens of different strategies and systems. For instance, how do you manage state for cloud-based applications? How do you fine-tune state control for distributed microservices architectures? And how can you get a handle on the intricacies of front-end and back-end state control?

This section takes a look at some of the most pressing state management issues today -- particularly when it comes to new architecture styles -- and strategies you can use to tackle them.

2Learn the fundamentals about statefulness and statelessness

When it comes to application state management, it can be troublesome to understand how to deal with an application component that is supposed to be inherently stateless. However, it isn't always easy to understand exactly how a stateless service behaves compared to a stateful service, or how to appropriately manage them

This section examines the intricacies of stateless behavior, including why stateless behavior should not be conflated with immutability and the development implications surrounding stateless microservices.

3Advantageous state-centric use cases and examples

There is no limit to the complexity that state-related issues can bring upon a project. That's what makes it so important to understand how state control works in action and how teams can inventively use state control to their project's advantage.

This section lays out some fundamental lessons to learn when it comes to state, such as how service brokers can act as a powerful mechanism to manage state control practices, how complex event processing can ease state management for distributed services, and some strategic ways to manage state in serverless architectures.