Modern N-tier Architectures
If three tiers are better than two tiers, which are better than a monolithic program (generally speaking), then is there any benefit to adding a fourth or fifth layer?
The answer is yes. Additional software layers can be identified from good modular design and separated out onto different physical tiers at suitable boundaries. Deciding what is a suitable boundary is the hard part.
The downside to additional tiers is that extra communication overhead can inflict performance bottlenecks. The upside of multiple tiers is that additional hardware (multiple servers and network bandwidth) can be used to alleviate the bottlenecks and improve reliability using techniques such as server farms and failover clustering.
The modern ...
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