ACE: Automated capacity evaluation for HP ePrint

The HP cloud ePrint Service allows customers to print from anywhere to an HP ePrint-enabled printer accessible via the Internet. As ePrint is a hosted service, it must provide customers with a high quality of service while keeping the costs of supporting the load as low as possible. The jobs entering the ePrint Service are diverse and complex in nature. The jobs vary largely in terms of their formats, sizes, originator clients, etc. With rapidly increasing growth in client requests, it has become imperative to understand the new service's characteristics and the service dynamics over time in order to efficiently support and scale the ePrint System. With the complexity of offered cloud services increasing and application requirements for QoS growing, the research challenge is to design an integrated framework of measurements and system modeling to support performance analysis of these services. We have developed a new tool, called ACE (Automated Capacity Evaluation), which enables a QoS-driven capacity planning for ePrint service (see [2] for more details). A user interaction with ACE is performed via a GUI written in Python: given a response time goal and a workload for processing, ACE estimates the amount of resources required by the ePrint System for job processing with given performance goals.