After writing my previous entry of how a container image, such as Docker, makes a natural unit of failure for an individual microservice or groups of related services, I wanted to follow up on one of the things I didn't get into detail on: state. Where does the state of the microservice reside? Is it within the container image, which may seem intuitively correct, or is it outside of the image? I've been thinking about state and replication for many years (well over 20) and was revisiting one of my earlier papers recently and got to thinking that it was relevant to microservices, or at least containers (since of course a container doesn't need to be tied to only being useful for microservices!) With that in mind, I found a few hours today to write up some thoughts on state and containers in general, but specifically microservices, Hopefully it makes some sense.