How Amazon EKS and Precisely’s Geo Addressing SDK Power Real-Time Decisions

By Diana Smith, Sr. Sales Engineer – Precisely
By Mayank Kasturia, Sr. Sales Engineer – Precisely
By Ayan Ray, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Precisely

Most organizations rely on some type of address data to power business decisions. Problematic addresses can have huge impacts on business analytics, increasing exposure to risk, fraud, and unnecessary costs. Multiply that risk by a large volume of addresses and the impact can be significant.

Solving these issues requires software with advanced algorithms that match, geocode, and verify addresses—a process referred to as “geo addressing.”

Precisely’s geo addressing solution is coupled with data enrichment to enable organizations to accelerate the use of address data and quickly associate rich, relevant contextual information to power faster and more confident decision-making.

The Precisely Geo Addressing SDK allows organizations to develop and deploy geocoding desktop, mobile, or web applications capable of delivering location information for over 250 countries and territories. The software development kit (SDK) runs within cloud-native and big data environments using Kubernetes and Spark cluster deployment to help organize, manage, analyze, and visualize business data in ways that yield actionable insights.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and on-premises data centers. In the cloud, EKS automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks.

With Amazon EKS, you can take advantage of the performance, scale, reliability, and availability of AWS infrastructure, as well as integrations with AWS networking and security services.

This post walks you through how Precisely’s geo addressing solution creates an accurate, current, and correctly formatted dataset of properties and associated locations, with rich context in a single solution deployed at scale on AWS.

Precisely is an AWS Partner and industry expert for legacy data integration, quality, and location intelligence. Its geo addressing solution is for businesses dealing with large volumes—more than 100 records per second—of address data that need to be processed immediately or in real-time.

Real-Time Geo Addressing Solution Overview

Precisely’s real-time geo addressing solution provides address parsing, verification, auto-completion, geocoding, reverse geocoding, and unique key lookup, all of which are available as REST web services in the geo addressing application via SDK.

Precisely recommends combining these capabilities to create the most accurate and complete record of business addresses. Below is a description of each of the services offered:

Parse: Breaks down an address into standardized individual components.
Verify: Performs address verification and address by matching the standardized input to reference data.
Geocode address: Performs forward geocoding by matching input addresses and returning location information (lat/long) and other information.
Reverse geocode address: Performs reverse geocoding using input coordinates and returns address information that’s the best match for that point.
Address autocomplete: Suggests addresses and place names as you type.
Key lookup address: Returns geocoded candidates when given a unique key.

When deploying on AWS in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model, AWS services consumed in this solution include Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic File Service (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Geo addressing can be deployed in software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) models, which are not covered in this post. For more information on these deployment models, please contact Precisely.

Getting Started with the Geo Addressing SDK Locally

To get started with Precisely’s geo addressing solution, the SDK resources must be deployed and configured first. Precisely provides a command line interface (CLI) utility to execute the deployment on either Windows or Linux.

Below are the steps required to deploy and configure the SDK resources:

Create a location where datasets can be installed on Windows or Linux.
Run the CLI’s deploy command to deploy the application to a web app directory.
Locate and extract reference data (.spd files) which can be downloaded from data.precisely.com.
Configure data for the SDK based on the dataset location by running the configure command from within the interactive CLI.
Deploy the REST API to any application server, such as Tomcat.
Start the server from the Tomcat directory, or application server of choice.
Test performance using the geo addressing SDK sample application.

Once all the steps are complete, users can explore the interactive sample application that demonstrate service requests and responses as depicted in the following section.

Sample Geo Addressing Request and Response

The figure below shows the sample application provided by Precisely. Users can enter any available components of an address as a request parameter and will receive an immediate response.

Figure 1 – Geo addressing SDK sample application.

Below in Figure 2, you can see that a user has entered a poorly formatted address with no discernable separation between address components.

Meanwhile in Figure 3, you can see how the geo addressing engine was able to parse and match this record to a known address in the geo addressing reference dataset. It provides a host of meaningful metadata about the quality of the match as well as detailed contextual data.

Sample Request

Figure 2 – Sample geo addressing request.

Sample Response

Figure 3 – Sample geo addressing response.

The ability of the geo addressing engine to take fragments of an address and match them to a known location underscores the power of this solution. It’s important to note the sample response in Figure 3 was simplified, and that Precisely’s geo addressing referential data contains up to 150 attributes for each address, depending on the country.

Key response fields to pay attention to include Match Code, Location Code, and PreciselyID, which provide indicators of the address’s positional accuracy as well as the strength of the database match.

Match_Code: Indicates which portions of the address matched to a record in the database. In this example, S81E signifies the address was standardized to U.S. Postal Service data with changes to the ZIP+4, street type, street name, and predirectional/postdirectional required to get a match. All changes are expected given the poor formatting of the input address.
Location_Code: Indicates the locational accuracy of the assigned geocode. AP05 signifies a point-level geocode at the structure centroid. This is the highest accuracy available.
PB_KEY (PreciselyID): Unique and persistent identifier for data management and simple joining to Precisely’s extensive data portfolio.

There are many providers in the geo addressing space, but few provide the accuracy needed for confident, data-driven decision making as well as the addition information on the quality of the address match. This includes precision of the location coordinates, strength of database match, and a unique and persistent identifier for data management.

While some providers use a unique identifier, it typically lacks persistence and the precision needed to resolve complex entities and get to that single source of truth.

Users can also interact with a Precisely-hosted sample application without going through the deployment process.

Deploying the Geo Addressing SDK on AWS

To deploy the Geo Addressing SDK in the cloud, users can follow an IaaS deployment model that takes advantage of several AWS services.

A few things to consider when deploying this solution:

The geo addressing application is packaged as a Docker image and should be deployed to an accessible container registry, such as Amazon ECR.
Application requires a Kubernetes cluster with at least one node to run the geo addressing application, and a separate node for the NGINX ingress controller which can be created on Amazon EKS.
The geo addressing application requires reference datasets, which are .spd files that must be available on Amazon S3.
SDK requires the reference data to be available on the file system of the pod running the geo addressing service.
Due to the size of the reference data, the data is managed outside of the Docker image and configured during deployment.
Amazon EFS can be used to deploy geo addressing reference data. This approach minimizes pod startup time by preparing the reference data ahead of deployment on a shared persistent volume

Below is an architecture review of Precisely’s Geo Addressing SDK deployed on AWS infrastructure. Key steps are outlined in the following paragraph.

Figure 4 – Geo Addressing SDK IaaS architecture overview.

Develop the data prep staging and geo addressing service.
Create a Docker image with the Geo Addressing SDK and AWS configuration.
Push the docker image to Amazon ECR.
Use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that’s a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud.
Data prep staging service copies the latest vintage of the reference data from Amazon S3 to EFS.
Amazon S3 will provide the latest reference data for the geo addressing service.
Admin uses the EFS file system as a common data source for workloads and application pods.
Geo addressing service deployed in EKS with pod autoscaling is responsible for geo addressing an address request. The service is connected to the users via a load balancer.
Load balancer receives user requests and forwards them to different geo addressing pods based on availability and load on those pods.
Geo addressing service is consumed by another service (in the case of the microservices) or an end user.

Once deployed, businesses can take full advantage of geo addressing and data enrichment at scale to power business decisions. For a deeper dive into deployment please visit Precisely’s documentation resources on GitHub.

Customer Benefits

The benefits of leveraging Precisely’s geo addressing and data enrichment capabilities on AWS include:

Reap the benefits of AWS cloud deployment and cloud-native technology, including elasticity, high availability, and scaled costs to accelerate workﬂows. Current processes may be bogging down and overloading IT systems and infrastructure; by offloading to a newer, faster big data workﬂow, companies can recognize signiﬁcant performance improvements.
Users can give their cloud-native microservices the location advantage with a complete set of capabilities, including address management, geo addressing, and location analytics, without sacrificing speed or performance.
Users benefit from Precisely’s address verification services, high accuracy geocoding, and high precision location coordinates (lat/long), all of which ensures trusted data for confident business decisions.
Users can accelerate workflows using the PreciselyID to organize and join multiple data types. The use of a unique and persistent ID makes it fast when joining multiple datasets to add context to business data and reveal hidden relationships. Together with data enrichment, these capabilities help to organize, manage, analyze, and visualize business data in ways that yield actionable insights.

Case Study: Accelerated Conversion

U.S. communications service providers recognize the need to evolve into service enablers working with businesses, consumers, and even competitors to create unique 5G offerings that differentiate them in the market. This makes them highly reliant on the ability to link service addresses to network connection capabilities to understand content demand, network and bandwidth demand, usage patterns, and network economics.

By providing an accurate way of connecting provider networks to customer locations, Precisely allows each address throughout the provider network to be prescored, indicating the type of service offering that can be supported in each location.

In this case, a provider was rolling out a new service that was only available in specific parts of the country, and was looking for a solution to make it easy for customers to see if they qualified for the new service and, if so, to accelerate enrollment.

Using a comprehensive address dataset from Precisely, this provider was able to prescore addresses that qualified for its service and track those addresses using the PreciselyID. Then, using Precisely’s geo addressing solution running on Amazon EKS, when a customer typed in their address on the company’s website, the address was quickly verified, geocoded, and assigned a PreciselyID.

The PreciselyID enabled an instant status for qualified customer service locations without the need for costly lookups. This solution provided a seamless customer experience and an influx of converted prospects, and the service provider saw an advantage in its hosting fee structure by going with an elastic solution.

Using a high availability architecture that leverages multiple AWS Availability Zones within multiple regions, the deployment is ready-made for high throughput web applications where five nines (99.999%) availability is required.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how Precisely’s geo addressing capabilities can be deployed on AWS infrastructure to accelerate analysis and power real-time decision making.

For more information about the solution, or to see a demonstration, contact Precisely or test a few of your addresses on the sample site.

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Precisely – AWS Partner Spotlight

Precisely is an AWS Partner with more than 50 years of experience working with mainframe workloads. It has achieved the Amazon RDS Service Ready specialization by demonstrating significant technical expertise.

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