In an embedded system? No. Even in distributed systems, coordination of data from stateless systems can be a nightmare. Requiring a bit of stickiness simplifie

In an embedded system? No. Even in distributed systems, coordination of data from stateless systems can be a nightmare. Requiring a bit of stickiness simplifies a lot of things. For example, I've worked on a few large scale adserving auction platforms. One of them had the auction and impression events recorded statelessly (ie each event was generated on a random machine). This required a big hadoop job to match up all the events from a single auction. Another system used sticky events, where all events for an auction would hit the original server that ran the auction. It would store all events for an auction in memory and then flush it to the billing system when the data was finalized. Was it perfect? If the one machine crashed, all pending ad info wad lost. But that didn't happen often so the cost was negligible.