A client refers to a software or hardware accessing a resource or a service that is served by a server. While in some cases the server and the client might be on the same system/host, in most cases they will be on separate systems.
Examples for clients:
- A Web browser that is used by a user to access a certain web page
- A mobile phone that is used by the user to read emails
A server, similarly to a client, can be a software or hardware, but as opposed to a client, its role is to serve the client. It can be by providing a certain resource to the client or let it use a service that is running on the server. Few examples:
- A system that stores files and allow the user to access or download them
- A system that runs a service which allows users to listen to music
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Bare Metal: Physical Servers. An actual hardware. Often allocated per one customer, project, ... and not shared as in case of servers used for virtualization and cloud
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Virtual: Servers which provisioned on top of virtualization platform or a cloud (clouds like GCP, AWS and Azure for example)
So now that you know what is a server and what is a client, you probably understand the relationship between them where a client sends requests (or replies) to a server, while a server responds to a client based on its request.
