“Cons of Grid Computing
We have identified three major drawbacks of grid computing. These are listed in no particular order and are not all inclusive. There are many more cons, but these are representative of what you should expect if you include grid computing in your infrastructure.
• Not shared simultaneously. The grid computing infrastructure is not designed to be shared simultaneously without losing some of the benefit of running on a grid in the first place. This means that jobs and applications are usually scheduled ahead of time and not run on demand.
• Monolithic app. If your application is not able to be divided into smaller tasks, there is little to no benefit of running on a grid. To take advantage of the grid computing infrastructure, you need to be able to break the application into nonsequential tasks that can run independently.
• Complexity. Running on a grid environment adds another layer of complexity to your application stack that is probably already complex. If there is a problem, debugging whether the problem exists because of a bug in your application code or the environment that it is running on becomes much more difficult.
These three cons are ones that you may see from integrating a grid computing system into your infrastructure. The significance of each one will depend on your specific application and implementation.”
—Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
