FEATURES:

Simplicity manifests itself by closely matching the flow of data with the control flow.
Modularity is achieved by organizing and integrating a group of computer operations into a
separate service. Any set of data with operations on this data can be organized as a separate
service. The whole distributed computing system developed based on the client-server model can
be easily extended by adding new services in the form of new servers. The servers which do not
satisfy user requirements can be easily modified or even removed. Only the interfaces between
the clients and servers must be maintained.

2.3 Cooperation between Clients and Servers

A system in which there is only one server and one client would not be able to provide high
performance, and reliable and cost effective services to users. As mentioned in the previous
section, it is necessary to use one server to provide services to more than one client. The simplest
cooperation between clients and servers based on sharing allows for lowering the costs of the
whole system and more effective use of resources.

Processes can act as either clients or servers, depending on the context. A file server that receives
a request to read a file from a user’s client process must check on the access rights of this user.
For this purpose the file server sends a request to an authentication server and waits for its
response. The response of the file server to the client depends on the response from the
authentication server. This implies that the file server acts as a client of the authentication server.
Thus, a service provided to the user by a distributed computing system based on the client-server
model could require a chain of cooperating servers.

2.4.1 Agents and Indirect Client-Server Cooperation

The role of these agents can vary from a simple communication module which hides
communication network details to an entity which is involved in mediating between
clients and servers, resolving heterogeneity issues, and managing resources and cooperating
servers. These aspects will be elaborated in other chapters of this book.

2.5 Service Discovery

In the case of a simple distributed computing system, where there are only a few servers, there is
no need to identify an existence of a desired server. Information about all available servers is a
priori. This implies that service discovery is restricted to locating the server, which provides the
desired service. On the other hand, in a large distributed computing system which is a federation
of a set of distributed computing systems, with many service providers who offer and withdraw
these services dynamically, there is a need to learn both whether a proper service (e.g., a very
fast color printer of high quality) is available at a given time, and if so its name and location.