Stateless Processes & Backing Services

Purpose and scope

Keep processes stateless; treat dependencies as replaceable with clear contracts.

Outcomes

• Predictable autoscaling and failover.
• Clear failure modes and timeouts.
• Simpler deployments across environments.

Signals of trouble

• Sticky sessions and local disk reliance.
• Coupled retries causing storms.
• Unknown dependency SLAs.

Remediation steps

1. Add graceful shutdown and idempotency; drain queues on termination.
2. Document dependency contracts and timeouts; implement backoff.
3. Chaos test critical paths and document runbooks.

Checklists and assets

• playbooks/stateless-microservices/checklist.md tasks.

References

• Resilience patterns; platform readiness probes.