You may recall in the December 2006 issue, I referenced a prediction I made earlier in the year. In fact, in the November 2006 issue I was "called out" a bit on this prediction by the cadre of analysts we interviewed.

My prediction was that this was a make or break year for Grid. As a subscriber to the Michael Gold school of thought (Jeff Goldblum's character in the Big Chill), I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. Hence I was able to rationalize my way out of that prediction by saying that I still think it was a "break year", but not in the sense of a bust. What we saw over the past year, and this was reflected in our conversations with analysts and past Globus Consortium Journal contributors alike, was the breaking down of Grid, and a resulting proliferation of Grid's component technologies. Two specific technologies that were mentioned were virtualization and Grid as complex SOA conglomerates that run and scale transactional Web applications.

In an interesting twist on the distilling down of Grid into SOA and virtualization components, is this CIO Insight case study, Inside eBay's Innovation Machine.

From the article:

The software that powers eBay's operations - and that supports third-party applications - allows interaction with any type of user application. "If you can't split it, you can't scale it," says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. "We've made ourselves masters of virtualization. The more horizontal you can take a system, the less costly it is to operate." When it comes to hardware and software, "it's all about splitting so you can scale individual applications separately," he says.

He uses terms such as "virtualization" and "service-oriented architecture" to mean basically the same thing: splitting up large chunks of technology, such as servers, applications, etc., to make them look like one large service. "Virtualization or SOA hides the complexity of how the services are managed and allows for increased scalability. Search is an example from eBay - it is split across multiple servers and applications, but it looks like one single service to the outside user," Billingsley says.

What this says in a nutshell is that it's not the core components that really matter, but the core functionality, whatever you want to call it, for your particular application. This leads us to this issue where I put the focus on the application. In fact, I'd like to see that permeate throughout the year. Perhaps we can make 2007 "The Year of the Grid Application".

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