Characteristics Of Client/Server Architectures

1. A combination of a client or front-end portion that interacts with the user, and a server or back-end portion that interacts with the shared resource.

   The client process contains solution-specific logic and provides the interface between the user and the rest of the application system. The server process acts as a software engine that manages shared resources such as databases, printers, modems, or high powered processors.

2. The front-end task and back-end task have fundamentally different requirements for computing resources such as processor speeds, memory, disk speeds and capacities, and input/output devices.

3. The environment is typically heterogeneous and multivendor. The hardware platform and operating system of client and server are not usually the same. Client and server processes communicate through a well-defined set of standard application program interfaces (APIs), RPCs, and RMIs.

4. An important characteristic of client-server systems is scalability:
   • Horizontal scaling means adding or removing client workstations with only a slight performance impact.

   • Vertical scaling means migrating to a larger and faster server machine, or to multiservers.