Focus on resource sharing
Users are so accustomed to the benefits of resource sharing that they may easily overlook their significance. We routinely share hardware resources such as printers, data resources such as files, and resources with more specific functionality such as search engines. Looked at from the point of view of hardware provision, we share equipment such as printers and disks to reduce costs. But of far greater significance to users is the sharing of the higher-level resources that play a part in their applications and in their everyday work and social activities. For example, users are concerned with sharing data in the form of a shared database or a set of web pages – not the disks and processors on which they are implemented. Similarly, users think in terms of shared resources such as a search engine or a currency converter, without regard for the server or servers that provide these.
In practice, patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope and in how closely users work together. At one extreme, a search engine on the Web provides a facility to users throughout the world, users who need never come into contact with one another directly. At the other extreme, in computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly share resources such as documents in a small, closed group. The pattern of sharing and the geographic distribution of particular users determines what mechanisms the system must supply to coordinate users’ actions. We use the term service for a distinct part of a computer system that manages a collection of related resources and presents their functionality to users and applications.
For example, we access shared files through a file service; we send documents to printers through a printing service; we buy goods through an electronic payment service.
The only access we have to the service is via the set of operations that it exports. For example, a file service provides read, write and delete operations on files.
The fact that services restrict resource access to a well-defined set of operations is in part standard software engineering practice. But it also reflects the physical organization of distributed systems. Resources in a distributed system are physically encapsulated within computers and can only be accessed from other computers by
means of communication. For effective sharing, each resource must be managed by a program that offers a communication interface enabling the resource to be accessed and updated reliably and consistently.
The term server is probably familiar to most readers. It refers to a running program (a process) on a networked computer that accepts requests from programs running on other computers to perform a service and responds appropriately. The requesting processes are referred to as clients, and the overall approach is known as client-server computing. In this approach, requests are sent in messages from clients to a server and replies are sent in messages from the server to the clients. When the client sends a request for an operation to be carried out, we say that the client invokes an operation upon the server. A complete interaction between a client and a server, from the point when the client sends its request to when it receives the server’s response, is called a remote invocation.
The same process may be both a client and a server since servers sometimes invoke operations on other servers. The terms ‘client’ and ‘server’ apply only to the roles played in a single request. Clients are active (making requests) and servers are passive (only waking up when they receive requests); servers run continuously, whereas clients last only as long as the applications of which they form a part.
Note that while by default the terms ‘client’ and ‘server’ refers to processes rather than the computers that they execute upon, in everyday parlance those terms also refer to the computers themselves. Another distinction is that in a distributed system written in an object-oriented language, resources may be encapsulated as objects and accessed by client objects, in which case we speak of a client object invoking a method upon a server object.
Many, but certainly not all, distributed systems can be constructed entirely in the form of interacting clients and servers. The World Wide Web, email and networked printers all fit this model.
An executing web browser is an example of a client. The web browser
communicates with a web server, to request web pages from it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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