Within every innocent web application lies a sleeping monster. There comes a time when every successful web application outgrows its single-machine architecture. Whether for high-availability, scalability, or both, the adult web application must grow to live on more than one application server. That’s when the latent beast strikes: the State Monster. The most recent accepted wisdom about solving application state problems in a scaled-out production architecture is to make your web application “stateless”—i.e., externalize all application state out of the application tier so that any application server can serve any user request. Unfortunately for the owners of such applications, making it “stateless” is hard to do, corrupts the programming and data model of the application, and pushes the problem out to other pieces of infrastructure that are ill-equipped to handle it. Stateless programming is hard on the application developer, hard on the application infrastructure, and hard on the application. There must be a better way to write business applications. In this talk, we will discuss the current “stateless” application paradigm, its shortcomings, and a new alternative using Terracotta’s open-source availability and scalability technology for the Java Virtual Machine.