Abstract
This paper describes CloudStore, an open source application that lends itself to analyzing key characteristics of Cloud computing platforms. Based on an earlier standard from transaction processing, it represents a simplified version of a typical e-commerce application – an electronic book store. We detail how a deployment on a popular public cloud offering can be instrumented to gain insight into system characteristics such as capacity, scalability, elasticity and efficiency. Based on our insights, we create a CloudStore performance model, allowing to accurately predict such properties already at design time.