Intuit Used Cloud to Test TurboTax for Peak Load on Tax Day
TurboTax from Intuit was used by 18.76 million taxpayers in 2008, including both the online and desktop versions, with the online version about twice as popular as the desktop version. This is a record, and up 11% from 2008. The IRS has sought to raise the proportion of online tax filings, and long before the April 15 tax deadline, Intuit searched for possible performance and reliability issues that might be concealed within its software.
The nature of Intuit’s product required them to set quality and performance goals to test steadily increasing user loads with a peak on tax day, April 15. The ultimate testing goal was 200% of their anticipated peak of concurrent users. Due to the cost prohibitive nature of quickly building the required infrastructure, Intuit turned to Amazon Web Services and Amazon EC2. By engaging with AWS and utilizing their powerful toolset, Intuit instantly had access to a reliable and scalable test environment that allowed them to exceed their testing goals.
Although Amazon Web Services might be able to handle the infrastructure, it was still imperative for Intuit to have an enterprise-class load testing solution which would handle the terabytes of the test data which was going to be generated–something which could leverage Cloud to meet the anticipated surges in traffic, especially considering the vital mission factor of online filing. Intuit went with SOASTA since its CloudTest-EC2 On-Demand Service would be able to precisely and rapidly replicate the expected user load on the TurboTax site. This testing service authentically simulates many kinds of unconstrained user scenarios, measures site performance accurately from the load that is generated through Amazon EC2, and also gives real time, granular reporting in order to help identify and then manage possible issues. SOASTA’s cloud testing authorities leverage Amazon EC2 so as to affordably and rapidly simulate the true web environment.
Intuit used SOASTA’s service for testing the previously unreachable number of virtual users. SOASTA employed an iterative approach which starting with a 1,000-user’s test. Generating load from Amazon EC2, Intuit ramped the volume with each subsequent test. Finally, while real customers accessed the production site at the same time the test goal of 200% reached at anticipated peak all. The site performed perfectly on tax day the problems were tackled before they impacted any users. Reliability and scalability of Amazon EC2 are capable of thanks because they combined with on-demand web load testing.
