> A paged response needs to sync state across many machines. As you have said, you need a clientID, a cursor reference, or a sticky session. That's not nothing.

> A paged response needs to sync state across many machines. As you have said, you need a clientID, a cursor reference, or a sticky session. That's not nothing. OK, I think this is what I was misunderstanding in your comments above. You can keep pagination state in a distributed store, but it's not necessary. The implementations I've seen and worked with have all embedded all the information needed to generate the next page of results in the cursor token itself. Kind of like with a JWT or TLS session ticket, there's no need to sync pagination state or use sticky sessions. That approach also provides some resilience in case the server that generated the previous page of results becomes unreachable (something that the client needs to handle by restarting pagination if pagination state is just held in memory by the server keeping the stream connection open).