Cloud vs. Grid, the conversation continues

I will add to the noise - much of which plays out on the Google cloud forums, but here is the distinction we use internally at CohesiveFT.

Products that were "GRID" products before "cloud things" were products like Gigaspaces, Globus, the UD of UnivaUD, Data Synapse, Condor and more.

Common uses for these products were for problems that could be chunked up and units of work handed off to worker nodes by some sort of distributor node. In the early days they replaced in-house built, cpu-scavenging techniques created by internal IT, most notably in global capital markets.

There was not, for the most part, in place, any software in enterprises that made it easy to roll these products out, and allocate resources to them. As such this sector of vendors have had a REALLY hard slog.

Here WAS the sales cycle:

Dear Mr. Customer,

Thank you for agreeing to do a trial evaluation of Grid Product Foo.
Here are the steps we will be going through:

1) Allocate us 50 hardware servers in your facility
2) Have your sys admins learn how to install our software and any of its dependencies for the OS's you allow in your facility
3) Have your operations staff learn how to start, stop, status, manage our software.
4) Run our "canonical" Hello World program just to see the basics of our solution's capabilities.
5) Start thinking about what the "hello world" analogies of your company are that might be valuable.

Thanks,

Fred Salesguy, Grid Foo Inc.


Those vendors were collectively the Grid market. I am a pragmatist - and I look at it from the market's view.

Now after the Amazon Cloud (I think we agree Amazon is a cloud, we just don't agree what a cloud is) and facilities like is, here IS the sales cycle:

Dear Mr. Customer,

Thank you for agreeing to do a trial evaluation of Grid Product Foo.
Here are the steps we will be going through:

1) You staff will need to make sure you can use a web browser or a VNC desktop to this IP_Address of our Grid Foo User Interface.
2) There you will be able to evaluate the "Hello World" program of Grid Foo and begin thinking about analogies in your business needs.

Please contact me when you are ready to start your evaluation.

Thanks,

Fred Salesguy, Grid Foo Inc.

ps. We will need 10-12 minutes notice before you want to begin your trial, because we do need to startup all of the necessary infrastructure.


OK - so there was an entire set of products that fall into the realm of dynamic distribution of workloads, usually in the form of a computer language module, usually Java, and they were called Grid.

Now we have a thing called Amazon Cloud (and a few others like it) and the thing called Cloud absolutely transforms the business model and sales cycle of the things called GRID. Gigaspaces, a partner of ours, have shown we can bring the customer time-to-evaluation down to minutes from an infrastructure point of view. This is transformative.

I would start there in my understanding and classification endeavors.