May 23, 2007
Over the past decade, due to the promising potential of the client-server paradigm, our IT infrastructures have grown along with our changing research and business needs, with often ad-hoc add-ons and fixes, as globalization proceeded to flatten the world. Today, many businesses and research communities face the need to restructure and align their existing IT infrastructures to achieve the flexibility and efficiency needed to compete in a rapidly changing world. During the same time, the grid computing paradigm has evolved, providing 'piping' technology and tools to virtualize the whole IT stack, from the network and hardware resources up to the application and services layer. Still, our experts in multiple locations work on different building blocks, like the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), or the Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), within local or global settings. Just because we are using different names must not mean that they are so different. Therefore, one aim of our presentation should be to analyze the differences and commonalities of these architectures, and demonstrate their strengths with the aid of practical use cases. This presentation has a slight grid-bias, in concert with the perspective and experience of the speaker.
