Using clouds to provide grids with higher levels of abstraction and explicit support for usage modes

Grids in their current form of deployment and implementation have not been as successful as hoped in engendering distributed applications. Among other reasons, the level of detail that needs to be controlled for the successful development and deployment of applications remains too high. We argue that there is a need for higher levels of abstractions for current Grids. By introducing the relevant terminology, we try to understand Grids and Clouds as systems; we find this leads to a natural role for the concept of Affinity, and argue that this is a missing element in current Grids. Providing these affinities and higher-level abstractions is consistent with the common concepts of Clouds. Thus this paper establishes how Clouds can be viewed as a logical and next higher-level abstraction from Grids. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.