What are the technical underlying distinctions between grid and cloud computing?
Grid computing has been around for a long time and is sometimes confused with cloud computing because both types of computing work outside the firewall to the local network. They both use other machines either by volunteer network or by renting those from companies set up to help with the specified operation. Both types of computing use internet to connect to the cloud or the grid.
What differs grid from cloud computing is that computers on a grid tend to be geographically distant, and very loosely coupled together. Grid computing is mostly used in the scientific community where several computers are used at the same time to solve a single technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.
Cloud computing evolves from grid computing and provides on-demand resource provisioning. Cloud computing is provided as a 3rd party service that includes software as a service, platform as a service, or infrastructure as a service. With cloud computing, access to the service is instant and companies can scale up to massive capacities in an instant without having to invest in new infrastructure.