Chapter 5. Deploying P2P Solutions

Before getting lost in the technical detail of the different implementations, fascinating as that may be, let’s take a moment to consider the practicalities of choosing and deploying a p2p solution in the first place. In other words, we should try to relate the deployment context and the goals with a general evaluation of the potential benefits and problems that peer technologies might bring.

The individual user usually has great freedom to install any desired peer technology and usually demonstrates a casual attitude to connecting p2p to an external and essentially untrusted network such as the Internet. Therefore, the deployment discussion has a marked bias towards business contexts, where multiple clients and a particular technology are to be deployed into a specific context and an existing community. The corporate decision process is more involved and is often determined by factors other than simple functionality requirements, and it’s some of these factors that are considered in this chapter.

However, deployers in both individual and business contexts do well to consider the general issues. Even the casual individual user should look for the nonobvious requirements and constraints that are built into particular solutions, any one of which could easily turn into a “gotcha” after deployment. Such an awareness, sensitized by asking the right questions and examining the solutions from a perspective nearer the corporate one, can promote the realization that some client software might be unacceptably limited or intrusive for virtually any context.