The state is part of any service, and state is built upon data. For a more cloud-native experience, a service cannot depend on a traditional filesystem and needs to use other kinds of storage structures to store data. Databases are a natural progress, and there are some types of databases to choose from, depending on how important and complex our data is.

Assuming our state is securely stored in a database service of some kind, it's also important to ensure our data cannot be corrupted using our service. There can be security flaws and bugs in our service that may put our data at risk, so it's important to write simple code, validate input, and think about security in general when planning the service roadmap.

To progress our service, let's introduce something we haven't done yet, and should, which is a proper test suite. In the next chapter, we'll see some good options and create a test suite, establishing whether anything needs to change in order to make our service as secure as possible.