Stateful Data, Stateless Database Schema, and Code

Abstract

Stateful and stateless programming can be defined as software code that maintains a state or data element, or sees each interaction without previous context. Stateful programming is the dominate sibling because any time a variable is set (i=1), a data element is captured (for example, capturing customer order information on an e-commerce site), a variable in a loop is incremented, or an array is used, a state is present. In and of itself, stateful is not a problem because state is needed for many transactional interactions. DevOps does not mandate that all code must become stateless, but there are times when stateless brings opportunity.