An email blast from Derrick Harris at Grid Today lead me to a great article by Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist at eBay labs regarding the need for grid computing in building large commercial applications. Few companies know more about scaling commercial apps than eBay so I’ll simply quote a couple pieces and let you read the rest for yourself:

” . . . Google, eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon cannot fit into single instances or clusters of traditional databases or file systems. All of these applications or services treat the network as the platform, hence the assertion that infrastructures, such as eBay’s, are, in fact, grids.”

“While these Internet behemoths are at the extreme end of things, almost all application developers and datacenters are using similar techniques to scale their services. ”

“What’s missing is the crucial element of integration — a horizontal layer of software that allows these vast sets of resources to be presented to applications or services in a consistent way, as a platform. This allows those resources to be effectively harnessed and shared, and to deliver the required scaling, throughput, efficiency and so forth. In fact, this software may be viewed as a meta-operating system.”

Of course, AppLogic is just such a meta-operating system and Paul’s article is well worth a read.