Microsoft® .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting

Physical Architecture

One topic we haven’t examined in much detail is designing the physical infrastructure for a distributed application. The focus of this book is on distributed application programming, not networking, firewalls, or Web servers—although the best programmers will know more than a little about all of these topics. If you are interested in taking a closer look at the hardware side of things, you might want to consider referring to a book such as Deploying and Managing Microsoft .NET Web Farms by Barry Bloom (Sams, 2001) or one of the titles from Microsoft Press. Here, we’ll just look at the absolute basics.

Scaling

When improving a system’s hardware, system architects generally distinguish between the following two types of scaling: ...