SGNL The REST architecture is extremely popular in modern computing environments. A benefit it provides is that each request can be serviced by independent server side components such as different instances of web servers or different instances of serverless request handlers. The lack of any context associated with a request means that the client has to provide the entire context with every request. In monolithic server-side architectures the client typically only provides an identifier to a previously established "session" on the server side, which is retrieved from a persistent storage such as a database. However, this strategy often does not work in microservices architectures, where the persistent storage may be many hops away from the server-side components that handle the incoming REST API requests. As a result, REST APIs are used between services and each request is required to carry large context including tokens such as Transaction Tokens [TRATS] (which assure the identity and context of each request), SPIFFE [SPIFFE] tokens (which assures the service identity) and possibly other context. The Contextualized REST (CREST) architecture adds a cached context to REST, with mechanisms to negotiate the establishment of the context when it is not found. Each request can refer to the context items it depends upon instead of carrying the entire context with the request. The server can accept the reference to the context item or respond with a specific error to prompt the client to reestablish the context. Clients can create new or delete existing context items in separate requests or as a part of other requests. The CREST architecture assumes the server holds the context across different requests in a server-side cache. Such a cache may be typically shared across various applications and services within a VPC or a data center. The possibility that subsequent requests from the same client will reach different VPCs or data centers is low, thus providing an efficiency optimization for the vast majority of requests.