Stateful vs. Stateless Architecture

There are two ways for a server to handle a series of requests from the same user: remember what happened in the earlier ones (stateful), or treat every request as if it were the first one it had ever seen (stateless).

State does not disappear in the stateless version. Somebody still remembers that you are logged in and what is in your cart. The question is only where that memory lives: inside the server that handles the request, or outside it.