In the P2P architecture model, all the actors are peers and there is no central coordinator between them. Each instance takes a part of the workload or shares its resources with other peers in the network. Generally, in this architecture, the nodes or instances act as both the servers and clients.
Though traditionally this paradigm implied equally privileged peers, in practice, there can be variations of this:
- Hybrid: Some instances might have a specific functionality.
- Structured P2P: Nodes might structure themselves into some sort of overlay and processing may flow like in the layered architecture pattern described previously. However, the key difference is that the overlay is temporal and disposable.
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