Microsoft TechEd 2008 was held in Orlando, Florida the week of June 2nd.  I was fortunate to attend many of the technical sessions.  I was surprised how many speakers were conveying the same message: 

CPU speeds are topping out.  If you want your applications to run faster and better you are going to have to build your applications in a new way.  The solution isn't just to learn how to multi-thread your applications.  The solution lies in building your applications into smaller units of code called tasks that can be moved around to the different cores of a multi-core machine.

Even in Bill Gates' keynote speech he said

Lately when I talk to architects and administrators about the Appistry fabric, I often hear the same question: "Is your fabric the same thing as a grid or cloud?"

The confusion is understandable.  We software types can't construct a good naming convention without someone else trying to overload them.  In this post I am going to provide my best definitions of the phrases cloud, grid, and fabric.  Each are valuable tools, but with different meanings and usage patterns.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the newest term on the block.  We often hear of clouds available at Google, Amazon, or IBM, but what is it?

Like most software terms, the term virtualization is becoming hopelessly overloaded.  As pointed out in a recent article, a definition of the different types of virtualization can be hard to come by.  When people see the Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) solution one of the first things they think of is application virtualization.  In this post I will try to resolve the confusion by detailing some of the key EAF features and how they relate to virtualization.  We will see that the EAF properties that promote scale, reliability, and maintenance of your fabric are better known as service virtualization.

An application virtualization definition