Addresscloud

Rearchitecting for growth, resilience, and scalability

With a growing number of customers located in London, Addresscloud wanted to reduce the latency of their services, which had up until then been supported by the AWS Dublin Region. They also wanted to improve their resilience by adding a second AWS Region to support their services. This would eliminate concerns about having to rely on a single Region. What’s more, an updated architecture would also make it easier to add even more AWS Regions as the company expanded to serve customers in other parts of the world.

By rearchitecting their platform, Addresscloud would also gain another benefit: improved compliance to satisfy the needs of one of their largest customers, Flood Re. The administrators for the UK government’s Flood Reinsurance Scheme, Flood Re promotes affordable and accessible flood insurance for homeowners across the UK. Flood Re does this by providing pooled reinsurance protection at a fixed rate to insurers underwriting coverage for hundreds of thousands of homes across the country. As a result, Addresscloud is a key supplier that manages tens of millions of insurer queries for the organisation every month. This made it risky to rely on a single AWS Region to support Addresscloud’s services.

Addresscloud’s engineering team set out to implement a multi-region architecture on AWS, but found that work to be more difficult than expected. That’s when their AWS account manager recommended working with AWS Partner Steamhaus.

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Rebuilding for high-performance and ease of maintenance

During the initial discovery phase, Addresscloud met with Steamhaus to review their existing cloud architecture and discuss what they wanted to accomplish. After working collaboratively with Addresscloud to envision an architectural design that would achieve those goals, Steamhaus then began building the new architecture using infrastructure as code (IaC) while following the AWS Well-Architected framework.

Steamhaus worked to make that new architecture a reality without impacting access for Addresscloud’s customers. And after Steamhaus finished rebuilding it, Addresscloud wanted to be able to take control again so they could maintain and modify the system as needed, using it as foundation for further innovation.

After those initial meetings, Steamhaus and Addresscloud worked on the project from their separate locations but communicated with each other constantly, often exchanging questions and answers on Slack. This helped both organisations stay aligned on strategies, goals, and ways of working.

Steamhaus and Addresscloud had complementary skills and tech stacks. Both were used to using IaC tools, and they used Terraform for the project, which is what Addresscloud had been using before. So the project provided a natural fit for both companies.

After finishing the code work, Steamhaus handed over everything to Addresscloud but remained available to answer queries and provide support.

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