GRIA was initially developed within the EC IST GRIA project, which ended in 2004. GRIA continues to be enhanced to meet the needs of industry through developments in many projects including European Projects SIMDAT, BRIDGE, edutain@grid, BEinGRID, ArguGRID, GridEcon, BREIN, IRMOS and UK TSB projects Avatar-M and MUPPITS.

GRIA 4.0 has also been used by the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute as the basis for their middleware, and some components are still common between the two. The main difference between the OMII and GRIA middleware is that while OMII focuses on supporting e-Science users, GRIA focuses on the needs of industry and places greater emphasis on providing managed and secure processes for managing resources and services. Early releases of GRIA provided four core services for managing billing accounts, resource allocations, data storage and job execution. GRIA 4.3 provided additional services for relational database access (OGSA-DAI 7.0 WS-I) and distributed workflows (based on IT Innovation's FreeFluo enactor), which were integrated into the GRIA framework.

GRIA 5 was designed to make it much easier for users to add their own services and make them manageable through SLAs and chargeable through the account service. GRIA 5 provided significant enhancements to the Basic and OGSA-DAI application service packages along with other usability and performance enhancements to other packages GRIA now support JSDL, integration of multiple heterogeneous resource managers at a single service provider and instrumentation of resource managers and applications for SLA based management.

The latest GRIA release is GRIA 5.3, which has a modular service-oriented architecture, based on use of key Web Service interoperability standards including an industrial WSRF profile using the WS-I doc/literal profile, and updated security features based on WS-Trust/WS-Federation token-based security patterns. GRIA 5.3 includes four main components:

• a service provider management package, incorporating an improved billing account service and a new service for setting up service level agreements (SLA)
• a client management package, comprising a membership service that issues tokens to users and supports policy federation with service providers, and a registry service for client side registration and discovery of resources;
• a basic application service package, containing job and data storage services; and
• a client framework, providing management GUIs for the management services and the basic applications, and APIs for developing client-side applications and adding further services.

For GRIA 5.3 addressed barriers to adoption such as integration with enterprise identity systems (MS ActiveDirectory / LDAP), enhanced policy-driven client API for intelligent service and resource selection, support for software licensing models building on multi-party federations and improved interoperability with .NET through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Client API.

GRIA 6 will raise the bar again for interoperability in the use of standards, and will incorporate more powerful models of service orchestration (workflow) and management making it easier to flexibly deploy and configure a wide range of services to meet different business requirements. Development of GRIA 6 will begin in Autumn 2008, and is expected to be released in Summer 2009.