Peer-to-peer architecture lets nodes act as both consumers and providers of resources such as files, messages, bandwidth, storage, or computation.

It can reduce central infrastructure load and improve edge locality, but production P2P systems still need careful discovery, security, replication, NAT traversal, and abuse handling.

This chapter covers what P2P architecture means, how peers discover and communicate with each other, common network designs, Distributed Hash Tables, content lookup, data distribution, replication, security, churn, and modern use cases.