Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
Practice this topic in a realistic system design interview
In a client-server system, every client depends on the same central servers for bandwidth, storage, and compute. For some workloads, like distributing a huge file to millions of people, that central point quickly becomes the limit.
Peer-to-peer architecture spreads the work across the participants themselves. This can take a lot of pressure off central servers, but it brings new problems: peers have to find each other, handle others leaving at any time, and work with participants they can't trust.
This chapter covers what peer-to-peer, or P2P, architecture is, how peers discover each other and share data without relying on a central server, and the benefits and challenges of this approach.