The Stateless Service design principle has become ubiquitous in the tech industry for creating horizontally scalable services. However our applications do have state, we just have moved all of it to caches and databases. Today as applications are becoming more data intensive and request latencies are expected to be incredibly low, we’d like the benefits of stateful services, like data locality and sticky consistency. In this talk I will address the benefits of stateful services, how to build them so that they scale, and discuss distributed and scalable services in the real world that implement these techniques successfully.
Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat and Distributed Systems Diva at Twitter, where she is the Tech Lead of the Observability Team. Prior to that she spent the majority of her career building large scale services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO. Caitie has a degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has worked on several video games including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, Halo 4, and Halo 5 She maintains a blog at CaitieM.com and frequently discusses technology on Twitter @caitie