Printing when your app is in the cloud
Hi
My clientwould like to move their synergy applications to the cloud. Part of my develop-ment and testing is carried iout in Azure anyway, so I know it will run without issue - its just another VM.
The one thing which concerns me is printing. If the printers are on my local netork and I try to print to them from a server which is very far away in a cloud server farm, are there any proacticl issue with this ?
Does it take significantly longer to print ?
Or is there some magic which means this is is not an issue at all, or is there a way to configure things to avoid or minimise this as an issue
I'm sure we are not the first people to move to the cloud and want to print things.
All of our printing is via the synergy windows print API and synPDF PDF generation
The trick is to compress the usually very verbose print stream until it gets into the local network then decompress and send the RAW print data to the local area networked printer.
Under Linux we send the compressed print job from the remote Synergy Application Server to a Raspberry Pi on the local network where it acts as a Cups print server and decompresses the data stream and creates the verbose RAW data and forwards onto the local printer very fast and very reliable and very inexpensive.
There are a number of solutions available on the web but we have no experience with them and Microsoft has a new all cloud printing solution that maybe worth looking at.
Cheers
Jeff