Grokking the System Design Interview
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Stateful vs Stateless Architecture

A user logs in, and server 1 handles the request. Their next click lands on server 3. Does server 3 know who they are?

That depends on one design choice. State is the data a system remembers between requests: who is logged in, what is in the cart, a half-written draft. The question this lesson answers is simple. Does that state stay inside one server's memory, or in a shared place every server can reach?

Clear up the common confusion first. Stateless does not mean the state disappears. Almost every application has state. A stateless server keeps no state in its own process

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Andre Hildinger

Andre Hildinger

· 5 months ago

I don't want to get into details because it'd be too long, but this whole explanation is misleading in multiple ways.

Every application has state in some capacity, but what we call "stateless architecture" is the default choice for the majority of backend applications. It's very hard to justify a stateful server (or it's very niche).

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