In an interesting twist on the distilling down of Grid into SOA and virtualization components, is this CIO Insight case study, Inside eBay’s Innovation Machine.From the article:The software that powers eBay’s operations – and that supports third-party applications – allows interaction with any type of user application. “If you can’t split it, you can’t scale it,” says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. “We’ve made ourselves masters of virtualization. The more horizontal you can take a system, the less costly it is to operate.” When it comes to hardware and software, “it’s all about splitting so you can scale individual applications separately,” he says. He uses terms such as “virtualization” and “service-oriented architecture” to mean basically the same thing: splitting up large chunks of technology, such as servers, applications, etc., to make them look like one large service. “Virtualization or SOA hides the complexity of how the services are managed and allows for increased scalability. Search is an example from eBay – it is split across multiple servers and applications, but it looks like one single service to the outside user,” Billingsley says.It’s not the core components that really matter, but the core functionality, whatever you want to call it, for your particular application. This leads me to believe that this distillation process we are seeing is the result of people actually doing real work with grids (or whatever you want to call them). This is a very good sign. Technology Industry