Grid Meter » Mash-ups on the Grid ...

May 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Mash-ups on the Grid ...

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By definition, Grid applications must be consumable across a range of heterogeneous platforms and environments. But as Peter Yared noted yesterday, "if you look at any J2EE application, it wasn't written to scale beyond four to eight machines ... and most hard core enterprise applications were simply not written to perform in scale-out, heterogeneous Grid environments."

And as Martin Brown from MCslp puts it: "A perennial problem with grid applications is making them flexible enough to be used across a range of potential platforms and environments. While older grids used a dedicated solution with rigidly controlled hardware and environments, it has recently become clear that making your grid application run on a wider range of platforms enables you to easily expand the scope and power of your grid simply by adding more machines."

So as the community works to figure out how to make applications scale better in Grid environments -- we've been hearing a ton of encouraging discussions over the last couple of years about how service-oriented architectures and convergence on Web services standards are breaking monolithic apps into interoperable components for use across heterogeneous environments.

Now we're also starting to hear some experts point out that SOA development directions are going to start surfacing the types of "mash-up" applications in enterprise that we've been seeing sprout up in the consumer world over the last year.

"Naturally, enterprises have taken notice of the rise of 'mash-up' applications on the Internet that integrate data from a variety of sources in new and useful ways," said Yared. "Large organizations also want to deliver composite apps, like CRM applications that can call other services. That way they can show, for example, that a customer's last five orders have been delayed before they make a sales call and get ambushed by an irate person on the other line. The days where each enterprise application is an island are coming to an end--even things as simple as an employee directory now need to integrate the HR systems of multiple divisions, accommodate cross-reporting and virtual teams, and integrate outsourced third parties."

And as Matt Haynos, program director for Grid computing strategy and technology at IBM, points out, the enterprise mash-up is increasingly within reach as SOA continues to gel in enterprise.

"As companies are moving towards SOA and they're more comfortable, you're going to start to see mash-up application development. We're at the very early stages, but it's sort of in the outside communities where developers are taking these well-exposed services and developing the innovative new composite applications. Once you have all of these services created, you can much more easily write applications that utilize these services and do interesting things and choreograph these services in interesting ways. So I'm a big believer that as SOA continues to mature to a services-based view, running on a virtualized infrastructure - we're going to see a lot more mainstream enterprise mash-ups being developed."

It may turn out that the enterprise mash-up becomes the Grid's first "killer app" in the commercial world. When you talk about breaking a monolithic app down into thousands of services -- that could require access to a certain quanta of data, storage, network bandwidth, etc. at any given time -- you start to introduce new resource management issues that Grid is specifically equipped to deal with.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on May 9, 2006 08:06 AM

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