This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
3.5 Pets Store State
Another way of describing pets is to note that they contain a lot of irreproducible state. Cattle are stateless, or contain only reproducible state.
State is, essentially, data or information. That information may be data files, configuration, or status. For example, when running MS Excel, the spreadsheet currently loaded is the state. In a video game, the player’s score, position, and status are state. In a web-based application, there is the application itself plus the database that is used to store the user’s data. That database is state.
The more state a machine holds, the more irreplaceable it is—that is, the more pet-like it is. Cattle are generic because we can rebuild one easily thanks to the fact that cattle contain no state, or only state that can be copied from elsewhere.
A web server that displays static content (web pages and images) is stateless if that static content is a copy from a master stored elsewhere. The web server can be wiped and reloaded, but as long as the content can be copied from the primary source, the new server is functionally the same as the original.
But suppose a web application has a database. If the machine is wiped and reloaded, the database is lost. We can restore it from backups, but then we will have lost any new data accumulated since the last backup was done. This web application is stateful.
Configuration data is also state, but it can usually be regenerated. Which software packages were installed and how they were configured are state, even though the contents of the software packages themselves are not state; they come from a master repository. The state can be reproduced either manually or via automation.
Irreproducible configuration state can be particularly insidious. In this case the state is not a particular configuration file but rather how the system was made that makes it a snowflake server. We’ve seen important servers that could be rebuilt only by installing an old version of the software and then installing an upgrade package; installing the final version directly did not work. Unknown and unidentifiable state was being generated during the upgrade process that somehow was not reproduced via the direct installation. This is the kind of unexplained state that makes you want to cry.