A local variable can end up referencing a large part of the program state. Some of this can be detected and automated to avoid putting unnecessary burden on the developers, but it's also part of our roadmap for Dispatch to create tools that help developers understand how their application will behave when it starts getting distributed.
This is why these solutions have often seen the creation of a new programming language as a necessary step to avoid those issues altogether. We think it's important to bring those capabilities to mainstream languages, we can't always go back from scratch with a new language.
Regarding where the state is stored, we keep everything in S3 and have plans to allow users to provide their own object store if they need to keep the application state in a storage medium that they own.
This is why these solutions have often seen the creation of a new programming language as a necessary step to avoid those issues altogether. We think it's important to bring those capabilities to mainstream languages, we can't always go back from scratch with a new language.
Regarding where the state is stored, we keep everything in S3 and have plans to allow users to provide their own object store if they need to keep the application state in a storage medium that they own.