Something about Architecture that I Know: Client-server

Hey there! I hope you’re all having a great day. Continuing with our discussion on software architectures, I’d like to introduce and explore the client-server model. This architectural style has been fundamental in shaping how applications are built and how systems communicate, serving as the backbone for countless modern solutions.

Nowadays almost every online service we use relies on a foundational model called client-server architecture, it's components, types, and real-life applications.

It's a network model based in two main entities -> clients and server. And they communicate it other to share data or specific logic tasks.

• Client: starts the request and wait for response server, displaying response to user.

• Server: responsible of processes the request, retrieving information and send it's back to the client.

Advantages:

• Centralized Control: server can handle multiple clients simultaneously, centralizating resources data management.
• Scalability: scalable architecture, allowing to add more clients or servers as needed without affecting the entire system.
• Data Security: the server part can be secured with layers of security controls.

Drawbacks:

• Single Point of Failure: if the server goes down, all connected clients lose access to data and service.
• Network Dependency: this model relies on network communication, poor connectivity can lead to an issues performances.
• Resource-Intensive: servers requires significant resources to manage and server multiple clients, which may increase infrastructure cost.

Conclusion

As I often emphasize in my articles, there is no silver bullet in software architecture. Instead, we navigate a landscape of trade-offs to identify the design that best addresses the specific problem at hand. This is one of those cases: this architectural model empowers a wide range of applications by efficiently orchestrating communication between clients and servers, ensuring scalability, robustness, and maintainability across diverse environments.

I hope this article was helpful in some way—happy coding! 🚀
Feel free to share your thoughts or suggestions in the comments below!