How is REST stateless?

Question

I know REST and knows to create RESTful web services without using session, i know its better but I don't really understand the concept of stateless and how using REST can make your application scalable

Can someone explain these two aspects of REST, stateless and scalability and how is SOAP different and not advisable?

Answer 1

A stateful API would maintain sessions for all connected clients. This would mean that the sessions need to be shared between servers, which limits scalability.

By storing this state on the client and sending it with each request, you can have the same state, but with better scalability.