“Making services stateless is widely considered to be a good idea.. The rub is that most applications need state of some form, and this needs to live somewhere, so the system ends up bottlenecking on the data layer.. Event streaming platforms come at this problem from a slightly different angle. Services can be stateless or stateful as they choose, but it’s the ability of the platform to manage statefulness—which means loading data into services—that really differentiates the approach.” Read more in Ben Stopford’s article “Building a Microservices Ecosystem with Kafka Streams“