A couple of us attended the first AWS Dublin User Group last Tuesday.  We met some interesting people and hope it will help us maximise our AWS investment.

I thought I'd write a quick blog to summarise the main lessons we've learned since we first migrated to Amazon's cloud in 2009.

Overview

We've had a re-think recently regarding our infrastructure environments for Autoaddress.   This blog will outline the issues and describe our new environment that will go live once customers have made required changes.

The Problem with Staging

When a customer is up and running it's straight-forward, they call our live production environment.  However, customers will generally have their own internal testing and staging environments, and want to call an Autoaddress staging environment rather than our production environment as they don't want to impact their billing/reporting.

Meanwhile at Autoaddress we view our staging environment as our place to hold the latest version of our code before it is released to production, allowing customers to regression check their code.

Inherently there is a conflict between the requirements of customer staging and Autoaddress staging:

"Please enter your address below" seems like such a simple request.  And you provide a nice form on your website to capture this information.  You expect people to enter their address the way that they would write it on an envelope, but life's never that simple.  The following are six strange examples of how people answer this simple question:

1.  I've decided you've asked me that in a pub

So I'll just say Dunboyne.  And nothing else.  It's like I was answering the question of "where do you live now" when asked by an old friend I've just met in the pub.

We all have an address.  We all write our address tens or even hundreds of times a year. Therefore, it can be hard to see how difficult it is to find and validate an Irish address. Then comes the day you add address capture to your website and suddenly this meekest of tasks becomes the source of immense stress, hair loss and a great story of how you found yourself chained to the front of Government buildings demanding the introduction of postcodes!

Thankfully, this isn't an inevitable outcome and is easily avoided if you are aware of the DOs and DONTs of Irish Address validation. 

Last Thursday, 7th July, the second Allsop/Space Irish Property Auction took place. The results of the auction are available on the Allsop site here.

You can read some in-depth reaction from the NamaWineLake Blog to the results of the auction here.

We thought that it might be useful to be able to see where these properties are located, so we have run the addresses through AutoAddress and mapped the results.