What is difference between Clustering and Grid Computing?

Cluster differs from Cloud and Grid in that a cluster is a group of computers connected by a local area network (LAN), whereas cloud and grid are more wide scale and can be geographically distributed. Another way to put it is to say that a cluster is tightly coupled, whereas a Grid or a cloud is loosely coupled. Also, clusters are made up of machines with similar hardware, whereas clouds and grids are made up of machines with possibly very different hardware configurations.

Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The datacenter hardware and software is what we call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing.

The difference between a cloud and a grid can be expressed as below:

1.Resource distribution: Cloud computing is a centralized model whereas grid computing is a decentralized model where the computation could occur over many administrative domains.

2.Ownership: A grid is a collection of computers which is owned by multiple parties in multiple locations and connected together so that users can share the combined power of resources. Whereas a cloud is a collection of computers usually owned by a single party.

Grid is defined as a large collection as machines connected by a private network and offers a set of services to users, it acts as a sort of supercomputer by sharing processing power across the machines. While Clusters are two or more computers who share a network connection that acts as a heart-beat. Clusters are configurable in Active-Active or Active-Passive ways. Active-Active being that each computer runs it's own set of services (Say, one runs a SQL instance, the other runs a web server) and they share some resources such as storage. If one of the computers in a cluster goes down the service fails over to the other node and almost seamlessly starts running there. Active-Passive is similar, but only one machine runs these services and only takes over once there's a failure.

clstuer is tidly coupled wile grid is loosly coupled