This document discusses principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service statelessness. It defines service statelessness as services minimizing resource consumption by deferring state management when necessary. This improves scalability and potential for reuse. The document describes different types of state data and state management approaches services can take, ranging from non-deferred internal state management to full external deferral of state to other parts of the architecture like a database. Maximizing statelessness allows services to exist in more scalable stateless conditions as much as possible.