Stateless

Written by Max Hinchman

Introduction

A stateless protocol is a protocol in which the receiver (usually a server) of the information does not retain any of the info from the session. The data in a stateless protocol is sent to the server so that each separate packet of information can be understood in isolation. Examples of stateless protocols are the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). IP is foundational internet communications protocol and HTTP is the foundational communications protocol for the web.

The advantages of a stateless communication protocol include lower server costs. By structuring the communication packets in a way that does not need to be stored on the server, it drastically reduces the amount of computing needed to process the information. Another advantage of a stateless protocol is that it is much easier to scale. If the information is stored on the client side, it allows the server to process more requests without worrying about overloading the server.

The disadvantage with a stateless protocol is that the development of services and applications depends on holding state. In the current stateless system, nodes connected to internet don’t hold any data about the history or current state. This is comparable to if a user of the web had no saved history on the web browser and had to manually input information every time. Cookies were developed in order for web-based applications to preserve state on each device and centralized service providers also hold state on their machines. While these two developments have led to much innovation on the internet, they have also played a central role in the centralization of data by large companies.

The current internet and web are combination of stateful and stateless protocol layers stacked on one another. HTTP, a stateless protocol is stacked on top of TCP, which is a stateful protocol. TCP is stacked on top of IP, a stateless protocol, which is then routed by a network running BGP, a stateful protocol.

Suggested Reading

Stateful and stateless authentication by Kenneth Choi

Understanding Web 3 — A User Controlled Internet by Emre Tekisalp

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