We know that if state is not used we can't handle deletions without affecting everything else. So here's a solution that could satisfy stateless proponents: we

We know that if state is not used we can't handle deletions without affecting everything else. So here's a solution that could satisfy stateless proponents: we don't keep state for anything that we deploy and instead we should store state for everything else so we will know what not to remove /s But seriously, as things are right now, state is necessary, it could be possible to get rid of it, but that would require cloud providers to designate their infrastructure that way. And if they do that, in practice (because components building the cloud service likely are stateful) we would end up with a system with declarative language which in reality just abstracts away the state from us. Kind of what AWS CloudFormation essentially is.