State Management

Abstract

At some point, services need to work with state. The way for persisting the state marks out how scalable they are going to be. In this chapter, I will walk you through a brief introduction to what is the difference between stateful and stateless services and what are the challenges for scaling them. As it typically happens, when you don’t want to incorporate some functionality in your code, you use an external service that provides the functionality you need out of the box. You will learn how Dapr helps you persist the state of your services by leveraging external state stores. When you make it to the point to persist data of a distributed application, you must think over two important traits – concurrency and consistency. Once I cover how the State Management building block works, I will go through the state stores that are supported by Dapr. I will also touch on how the Actors building block that I am going to cover in Chapter 10: The Actor Model relies upon state management.