Can cloud computing succeed where grid failed and find widespread acceptance in enterprise data centers? And is there still room for grid computing in the brave new world of cloud computing? We asked some grid computing pioneers for their views on the issue.

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And when it comes to IaaS [infrastructure as a service], I think in five years something like 80 to 90 percent of the computation we are doing could be cloud-based.

BuddyPoke cofounder Dave Westwood explains on the High Scalability blog how they achieved viral scale, Facebook viral scale to be more specific. BuddyPoke is today entirely hosted on GAE (Google AppEngine) and they some great insights and lessons learned.

On the surface BuddyPoke seems simple, but under hood there’s some intricate strategy going on. Minimizing costs while making it scale and perform is not obvious. Who does what, when, why and how takes some puzzling out. It’s certainly an approach a growing class of apps will find themselves using in the future.

Jamesh Varia from Amazon wrote a great Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices [PDF] paper:

This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud.

The AWS cloud offers highly reliable pay-as-you-go infrastructure services. The AWS-specific tactics highlighted in the paper will help design cloud applications using these services. As a researcher, it is advised that you play with these commercial services, learn from the work of others, build on the top, enhance and further invent cloud computing.

The Pingdom guys have another fantastic post on their blog about the state of Internet in 2009:

90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.

92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.

13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.

-22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.

These and more interesting statistics in their blog post.