TaxBuddy Case Study 

• High Infrastructure Costs During Peak Seasons: TaxBuddy’s reliance on AWS services such as Cognito, SQS, Lambda, and S3 drove up costs, especially during high-traffic tax filing periods.

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• AWS-Specific Account Lockouts: TaxBuddy faced account lockouts due to AWS-specific issues, prompting the CTO to explore a cloud-agnostic solution to mitigate vendor lock-in risks.​

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• Dependency on AWS Ecosystem: While essential AWS services, such as managed MongoDB, weren’t restrictive, the reliance on Cognito, Lambda, SQS, and S3 made flexibility and scalability across other clouds challenging.​​

• Containerization with Kubernetes: TaxBuddy’s entire application was containerized using Docker and deployed on Kubernetes, allowing the platform to run on multiple cloud providers. Kubernetes offered auto-scaling to handle high-traffic periods efficiently while laying the groundwork for future multi-cloud deployments.

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• Migration from AWS S3 to E2E Object Storage: A key cost driver was AWS S3, particularly the data transfer fees. SSBA Tech migrated TaxBuddy’s asset storage to E2E Networks’ S3-compliant object storage, significantly reducing costs while ensuring the platform retained compatibility with existing S3 APIs.

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• Open-Source Alternatives for Cognito: SSBA Tech provided open-source IAM solutions like Keycloak and Auth0 as potential alternatives to AWS Cognito. These solutions offered the same authentication and authorization capabilities without being tied to AWS, giving TaxBuddy more control and flexibility over user management.

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• Serverless Function Alternatives to Lambda: Instead of using AWS Lambda, SSBA Tech proposed adopting modern serverless frameworks such as:

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1. OpenFaaS: A cloud-agnostic serverless framework that works with Kubernetes and allows for easy function deployment across multiple cloud providers.

2. Knative: A Kubernetes-based serverless platform designed for building, deploying, and managing modern applications. It supports auto-scaling and integrates well with cloud-native environments.

3. AWS Lambda Container Support: For functions that could not immediately be migrated, SSBA Tech containerized certain workloads and ran them on AWS Lambda’s new container support, ensuring future flexibility to move these workloads to Kubernetes-based serverless alternatives.

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• Message Queue Migration from SQS: For AWS SQS, SSBA Tech proposed moving to cloud-agnostic message broker services like RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka, which could be deployed across multiple cloud environments and offer the same level of asynchronous communication needed for TaxBuddy’s operations.

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• Addressing AWS-Specific Account Lockout Issues: The AWS-specific account lockout issues were addressed by adopting a cloud-agnostic architecture. While the move to a fully multi-cloud strategy is still ongoing, the flexibility provided by Kubernetes has reduced the platform’s reliance on AWS, mitigating the risks associated with AWS-specific service failures.

• Cloud-Agnostic Infrastructure in Progress: TaxBuddy’s infrastructure is now Kubernetes-based, with their S3 storage moved to E2E Networks’ S3-compliant storage, significantly reducing storage costs and data transfer fees.

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• Reduced AWS Dependency: Although the full migration from Cognito, Lambda, and SQS is still being worked on, SSBA Tech has presented cloud-agnostic alternatives such as Keycloak, OpenFaaS, Knative, and RabbitMQ, providing flexibility and control over their infrastructure.

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• Mitigated Risk of AWS Dependency: The adoption of a cloud-agnostic architecture has reduced TaxBuddy's dependency on AWS, protecting them from AWS-specific issues like the account lockouts they experienced previously.

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• Ongoing Multi-Cloud Strategy: The transition to a multi-cloud environment is still a work in progress. However, the foundation laid by Kubernetes and the migration to E2E’s S3-compliant storage has already begun to provide cost savings and enhanced scalability.