Following up on an earlier post of "Computing off the tap", which was about Suns GRID service, this time we are going to talk about a post from Sun's very own Greg Papadopoulos titled " Computing as we know it"

It is an excellent post on, as he puts it on the "Fundamental Shift doe the model of software development from shrink-wrapped & packaged software to software as a network service."

This post was regarding a talk he gave at the Sun's annual Worldwide education and research conference.

In the post he puts up the stack, "Network Services Ecology"




Excerpts on the explanation of the layers of the stack:

The base layer is what I'll call the "Utility" comprising raw cpu-hours and gigabyte-months. These are the commodities of computational energy and remembering stuff.

The next layer are deployment "Containers". Today, we think of most grids as OS-specific process containers, but I'm betting this will rapidly evolve into more robust abstractions such as J2EE and Jini. Similarly, storage containers will comprise things like relational databases and fixed content stores.

The next layer is likely to have its own internal structure, but I'll lump it all together as "Network Applications". It's the thousands of services that will be created around things like search, email, CRM, gaming, ERP, and on and on.

Finally, I'll bet that this will give rise to whole new "Application Networks" that aggregate and stitch together the network applications to create the whole fabric of completely re-factored enterprise IT, or perhaps new styles of businesses entirely. Somebody is going to make a lot of money on this layer.Well, we are going to hear a lot more of it on a regular basis from now on...so is this the HYPE being generated BEFORE THE BUILD OUT?

Prashanth Rai