The demand for state retention has always been there in the development domains even if the public cloud usage is transforming the storage systems, databases, computations, and developments of consumption models. Also, we have always been looking for ways to achieve state retention by utilizing fewer resources. However, traditional approaches were fine for state retention in the cloud, but it is possible to maintain states more efficiently by approaching other methods. The reason behind maintaining states is that stateful applications can sync state information and make sessions more durable than stateless applications. In simple words, stateful applications are aware of the state, and the state is a substantial part of the interaction patterns either by machines or humans. According to the application use cases, it has the capability to recover the state from where the session was interrupted or put the user where they left off without any data loss.

AWS cloud platform contains some features that specifically deal with state mechanisms. AWS provides the state machine-based and task-based cloud-native service and Step functions that are designed to work with the AWS Lambda serverless development system. Step Functions allows AWS service to perform a single work unit or a task that is in the workflow state, and ensures that your application is running as expected or ordered. Well, other cloud services can also do the same. Well, it's just the difference of approaches as some cloud services are based on traditional development and some are built for some specific services such as Step Functions. You may find that many experts are using Cobol to Node.JS technology stacks to keep track of state or using tightly coupled techniques. Reality check, the trend is to use a loosely coupled mechanism and to imply a state retention approach. In other words, to maintain the state and the mechanism for state retention applications contain limited dependency in-between.

Why Is Loosely Coupled State Retention So Important In the Cloud Platform?

Loosely coupled state retention is important in the cloud for a few reasons:

1. At the time of designing a custom state retention mechanism in each application, you've to reinvent the wheel every time.

2. Application's tightly coupled state offers more resource allocations and with that, it also generates a larger cloud service bill at the end of the month.

3. The requirement to retain state between applications is growing considering that many intercloud and intracloud applications have already started to work together now.

The best news is that enabling loosely coupled state retention is considerably easy to do by taking a few new approaches. The first part is that state retention will also occur on the outside of the application. The second part is that even if the application is not tightly coupled, it can also function as a state retention mechanism properly. Well, it is not completely easy but neither hard to implement because there are multiple options available to implement loosely coupled state retention mechanisms. A few of them include a database or other storage devices to implement roll-forward and roll-back recovery mechanisms or achieve state maintenance by using data-oriented service or microservice from applications that contain state. By doing that you can maintain a state between applications and store all sessions to perform analytical or transactional processes.

Conclusion:

It is possible that the tools and platforms you're using for the deployment may provide the implementation of loosely coupled and state retention mechanisms as per your requirements. If they are not providing the required implementation process then you can also use the third-party resources for the same. Hence, we can say that loosely coupled state retention is the best practice while building or deploying your applications to the public clouds, and with that, it also makes applications more worthy to use and reduces the overall cloud spending. Want consultation and strategy-building guidance from the experts? CloudStakes Technology is always ready to help organizations who want to escalate their market position by keeping pace with the latest technology Managed IT solutions like Cloud Computing.