Grids vs. Services
IT-Director.com has a good piece on the challenges of leveraging both grid computing and service oriented architectures. Anyone who’s worked in the Wall St. tech space for any length of time knows how rare it is that an enterprise will properly adopt a major new computing paradigm the first go around, so what are the odds that it can be done for two major paradigms at once? I would say they are pretty slim, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying.
Yet the article raises a question that I frequently ponder, what are all these technical paradigms really going to be used for?
But, the question still remains, for what are grid and SOA technologies being used? grid’s history is primarily a high performance computing (HPC) one, and major uses are bleeding into finance, automotive/aerospace design and other heavy number-crunching environments. SOA is being used to support more flexible business processes in many areas.
I think that grids and SOA will be a lot like other over-hyped technical panaceas of days gone by, such as Java. Java is still here and strong as ever, but how many of us are using it for applets inside a web browser vs. back-end processes and serving up web pages? It will be interesting to see what Wall St. does with these technologies in the next several years, but something tells me in the end it will look different than what was originally imagined by the analysts whose job it is to forecast technical trends.
