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Avalara

Avalara scales global tax platform with MongoDB

Their Challenge

Avalara’s legacy SQL systems couldn’t keep up with rapid growth, putting the customer experience and the company’s ability to scale at risk.

Our Solution

Avalara migrated billions of documents to MongoDB Atlas and rebuilt its platform on a microservices-based architecture.

Outcome

Faster tax calls, 99.99% uptime, and a multi-cloud platform help Avalara serve more customers in more regions, with greater reliability.

Industry

Computer Software & Technology

Product

MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB Search on Atlas

MongoDB Vector Search on Atlas

Use Case

Modernization

Avalara and MongoDB video — Watch Venkata Surapaneni, Distinguished Architect, explain how Avalara’s team rearchitected Project Polaris across multi-cloud environments using MongoDB Atlas.

THEIR CHALLENGE

Scaling a global tax compliance platform for the future

Since 2004, Avalara has helped over 40,000 businesses manage tax rules, filings, and deadlines using its global agentic tax compliance automation software. The company has an audacious vision of being a part of every transaction in the world, and by 2020, it was operating in more than 90 countries.

Avalara’s growth presented an opportunity to modernize its data architecture. The company’s legacy SQL systems ran in a single cloud and a single region, which made it harder to scale, maintain low latency, and deploy closer to customers. Transaction volumes were climbing, and customers required faster response times, data sovereignty, and the option to choose a cloud provider. Avalara saw the chance to build something better: a modern data platform that could grow with the business.

OUR SOLUTION

Using MongoDB to support a resilient platform for Avalara

In 2021, Avalara launched Project Polaris, a full rearchitecture of its tax compliance platform. The team decoupled the monolithic frontend and backend into a microservices-based approach, with MongoDB Atlas as the foundational data layer.

The migration moved billions of documents from legacy SQL to MongoDB Atlas through a careful, cohort-by-cohort approach. The team used dual writes, data quality checks, and zero-downtime cutovers to protect data integrity throughout the process. Avalara now runs a highly available, multi-cloud architecture across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Azure Cloud Infrastructure. In 2025, Avalara launched Project Active-Active: an infrastructure modernization initiative focused on ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and scalability across its core tax compliance services, especially AvaTax.

“MongoDB stood out among all of the alternatives because of its flexible data model, multi-cloud support, and performance at scale without compromising concurrency.”

Venkata Rama Rao Surapaneni
Distinguished Architect, Avalara

Avalara uses analytics nodes for customer-facing live transaction reporting and analytics, change streams for event-driven workflows. The company is also running a proof of concept with MongoDB Search on Atlas and MongoDB Vector Search on Atlas to support hybrid search and AI workloads, including retrieval-augmented generation, contextualization, and activity streams.

OUTCOME

Delivering speed and resilience with room to grow

Avalara has achieved measurable gains through its modernization journey. Latency dropped from 500 milliseconds to under 150 milliseconds for end-to-end tax transaction calls. Uptime reached 99.99%, backed by multi-cloud redundancy, keeping customers running even if a cloud region goes down.

“We are excited to continue our collaboration with MongoDB and push the boundaries of what we can do in the tax compliance world. MongoDB will continue to support our audacious vision of being a part of every transaction globally.”

Venkata Rama Rao Surapaneni
Distinguished Architect, Avalara

The company reduced technical debt and costs by eliminating legacy SQL and Windows Server licenses and by adopting a tiered storage model that archives older documents to object storage. Additionally, reusable backend APIs have accelerated developer velocity, enabling Avalara’s teams to build and deploy new tax engines in a fraction of the time.

Avalara is expanding into new cloud regions across Europe and Latin America. With a platform designed to scale across any cloud, any region, and any workload, Avalara is well positioned for whatever comes next.

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