Powerful Utilities on the Web

I was quite impressed with this demo on utility computing and Grids applied to web services now. Take a look at this demo for AppLogic from 3Tera. Similar services are offered by ServePath as well. These applications show how websites can be built and scaled over a cluster of computers. This is very powerful if you know how this is done today: Sites get started as single servers with standalone storage and a database. In all these cases, the architecture of the system is typically mapped to a physical setup. Here is how the story develops: after a large number of users or transactions, the scalability of the site and its architecture could become issues. Operation of the site, location of data centers, distribution of data all become expensive day to day issues.

Grids help you focus on application scalability and architecture as long as you can stick to a standard web server architecture template. Grids also use general purpose machines and hardware and really get you the best of worlds when it comes to virtualizaton and large deployments. Virtual web space has traditionally been the tool of small organizations or companies which don't want to have IT expertise in house for managing the website. Larger organizations have traditionally preferred to get dedicated machines. Grids change that - they allow large organizations to get the benefits of virtualization and outsourcing of physical hardware to the Grid provider.