From a service perspective, state management deals with the decision to keep state information (variables) after the service operation has completed. In many circumstances, it is necessary to keep the state of a service in memory so that subsequent service calls can use it. In this case, stateful services are required. In other cases, there is no need to refer to in-memory state of prior service calls; here, stateless service calls are used.

State management is an issue related to service design.