I hear from a lot of readers that they are creating 3-tier ASP.NET apps and I always wonder if they know where the middle tier is.

In my opinion, the web server is the middle tier and client tier is the browser. Creating another set of machines to host the data layer isn’t really necessary and, in fact, hosting the data layer on the web server is easier to scale. We know how to scale out web servers. Inventing a new set of machines forces you to figure out how to scale them out and it does not increase your scalability by scaling out both the web server and a fourth tier.

If you disagree, please e-mail me and let me know what you think.