Deployment and configuration of grid computing applications are exhaustive and error-prone tasks, and represent a weak link of the lifecycle of grid applications. To address the problem, this paper proposes AGRADC, an architecture to instantiate grid applications on demand, which incorporates features from the autonomic computing paradigm. This architecture improves the grid application development process, providing tools to define a deployment flow, configuration parameters, and actions to be executed when adverse situations like faults arise.