Peer-to-peer

Computing over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, also known as peer-to-peer networking, is a kind of distributed application architecture that divides workloads or jobs among peers. Peers are participants in the application who have the same rights and are on an equal footing with one another. It is believed that they make up a peer-to-peer network made up of nodes.

Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disc storage, or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, eliminating the need for centralised coordination by servers or stable hosts. These resources may include processing power, disc storage, or network bandwidth. Peers may also share these resources with one another. In contrast to the more typical client–server architecture, in which the consumption and provision of resources are handled separately, peers act in both the capacity of provider and consumer of various resources.

Although peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been utilised in the past in a variety of application areas, the architecture was brought to widespread attention by the file-sharing system Napster, which was first made available in 1999. This idea has sparked the development of novel frameworks and philosophies in a wide variety of fields pertaining to human interaction. In these kinds of social circumstances, the term "peer-to-peer" is used as a meme to refer to the egalitarian social networking that has evolved all throughout society as a result of the proliferation of various Internet technologies.