A state machine is defined as follows:
Input- a set of inputsOutput- a set of outputsState- a set of statesS0 ∈ S- an initial stateT : Input * State -> Output * State- a transition function
If you model your services (aggregates, projections, process managers, sagas, whatever) as state machines, one issue to address is management of State. There must be a mechanism to provide State to the state machine, and to persist resulting State for subsequent retrieval. One way to address this is by storing State is a key-value store. Another way is to use a SQL database. Yet another way is event sourcing. The benefit of even sourcing is that you never need to store State itself. Instead, you rely on the Output of a service to reconstitute state. In order to do that, the state machine transition function needs to be factored into two functions as follows: