Stateless microservices are one of the most important things to take into consideration when designing a cloud-native solution for stateless microservices that are cheap, easy to develop, and highly scalable. For small businesses and start-ups cost and human resources (management) is a very important factor. Stateless microservices can help reduce cost and management overheads to a great level. Let’s take a look at how stateless microservices can help small businesses and start-ups to accelerate their software development projects.
Fast build, test, and deployment
Microservices architectures enable developers to build applications as compositions of independent services. These services isolate themselves and do not rely on other services. This accelerates the overall development process as the architectures make it possible to build, test, and deploy the individual services without having any impact on the respective build, test, and deployment process of other services. The modularity of the application helps in the parallel development of the application and hence accelerates the speed of the development lifecycle. Instead of making big changes at a slow pace, the microservice architecture enables the developers to make small changes at a fast pace.
Resilience and quick Recovery
However, if microservices are stateful, their acceleration is affected. In other words, when a microservice maintains state information to process requests, if it fails, the state is lost. Consequently, it cannot resume from the same point where it failed, potentially impacting the system. On the contrary, if a service is stateless, it will never impact the application. Even if the microservice fails, it can later restart normal operation without impacting the system. Stateless microservices do not maintain any state information within the service calls. They simply accept a request, process it, and send the response back, a stateful service, however, maintains some state information which it needs to process the subsequent requests from a user.
Consistency
The stateless microservices are very similar to the serverless framework in the cloud. They share many characteristics and underlying benefits. Like serverless the stateless microservices are quiescent, meaning that microservice has no information when it starts, also it does not needs any information which it will use to respond or run in a particular manner. So, it is pretty much guaranteed that the microservice will run in the same way for each invocation. This is helpful when you want to share something. Statelessness makes sure that the service run’s the same for each recipient. One additional benefit of being quiescent is cost-saving because of reduced consumption of resources.
Scaling
The stateless microservice enables horizontal scaling as the service can add additional threads to scale to the requests as it does not needs any state information and hence each thread can start processing the requests independently. Stateless microservices are also advantageous for load balancing purposes. When maintaining the state in a stateful microservice, configuring sticky sessions on the load balancer becomes necessary to ensure that stateful requests are routed to the same server. However, this defeats the purpose of load balancing. On the other hand, stateless microservices do not require sticky sessions, allowing for effective load balancing. This makes stateless microservice’s most fault-tolerant and highly available.