A network architecture in which a computer or process on the network either acts as a client or server. The application processing in a computer network is divided between client and server. Servers are powerful computers that are dedicated to manage disk drives, printers, network traffic, etc. Clients are situated at workstation or PCs on which users run the applications.
Information can be exchanged in a networked environment between the clients and server where the server has some resources that are shared by the clients. Servers require high computing power.
In a client server architecture individual computers called as clients are connected to a centralized computer called server. Client computers have an interface to allow the client to request the resources and display the results given by server. The server waits for request from clients and directly responds to the clients request with its own resources.
Clients are generally browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, etc. where they interact with servers using a set of instructions called protocols. The protocols provide accurate transfer of data through the browsers request and servers response. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Telnet are some protocols that are used on world wide web which is a part of internet.
An example of client/server network is file server. A file server is a central computer that acts as a storage space on the network for storing files, spreadsheets, databases, etc. Instead of storing data on every computer, the file server allows the clients to store these records on a single computer to make them sharable.