Statefulness in Distributed Systems

Have you ever built a service where, if you could just maintain a bit of state, the world would be a much simpler place? Join me, Joe Rawlings (developer @ Amazon), as I take you on a journey through the wonderful world of stateful services in a distributed environment. I'll introduce you to some basic concepts that will require re-orienting your mind to think about statefulness vs statelessness, some common use cases for stateful services, the pitfalls to avoid, and my own experience building a highly available, high throughput stateful workflow engine. And, as a bonus, learn how you are already using stateful services in production today (and might not know about it) along with easy ways to get started in case you aren't.