State

State is the current or desired condition of a system, resource, or service. In infrastructure work, the term often appears in the context of declarative systems and reconciliation.

Common Meanings

• Process state in operating systems.
• Desired state in configuration management.
• Cluster state in orchestration systems.
• Infrastructure state in Terraform.

Practical Notes

• Be specific about which kind of state you mean.
• In a declarative system, desired state is the source of truth.
• In debugging, state usually explains why a system behaves the way it does.