Advantages of Client-Server Architecture over Peer-Peer (P2P)
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Greater Ease of Maintenance:
Client-server architecture enables the roles and responsibilities of a computing system to be distributed among several independent computers that are known to each other only through a network. This creates an additional advantage to this architecture: greater ease of maintenance.
- Because, data storage is centralized, updates to that data are far easier to administer than under a P2P. Under a P2P architecture, data updates may need to be distributed and applied to each “peer” in the network, which is both time-consuming and error-prone, as there can be thousands or even millions of peers.
- Most of the data is stored on the servers, which usually have much greater security controls than most client systems. Servers can better control access and resources, to guarantee that only those clients with the appropriate permissions may access and change data.
- Client-Server architecture functions with multiple clients of different capabilities.
