Frequently asked questions

Pilotcore was incorporated in the federal jurisdiction in Canada in 2018.

Pilotcore does not specialize in specific client verticals, but we have done extensive work with SaaS companies, non-profits, health, food, and finance companies.

Pilotcore is a boutique company with senior leadership. We provide flexible and personalized service to our customers. We strive to be accessible and agile, not rigid and slow as larger consulting companies can be. We also place an emphasis on client empowerment through our knowledge transfer and training offerings.

We begin with a pre-sales technical discovery call with your technical staff and the project's executive sponsors in order to get a clear understanding of where you are now and where you need to be. We then work on a high-level architecture and Statement of Work which we include in our contract for services.

Our projects are done on a Time & Materials basis.

We provide a project manager who oversees the team's processes, supports sprint planning and tracking, reports to stakeholders, and coordinates tasks across engineers. Acting as a guiding force, they remove roadblocks and facilitate smooth project progression. Their part-time engagement is dedicated to ensuring efficient project coordination.

Our company takes data security and privacy very seriously. We implement stringent security protocols and adhere to best practices, which include encryption, access controls, regular audits, and secure network architectures. We comply with all relevant data privacy laws and regulations, ensuring that all customer data is handled responsibly and securely. Regular staff training is also conducted to ensure a continued focus on data security. Your data security and privacy are our top priorities.

Absolutely. Please reach out to us for more information.

As a cloud consultancy, our commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility is significant. We promote the use of cloud computing, which is inherently more energy-efficient than traditional on-premise infrastructures, reducing carbon footprint. We guide clients in optimizing their cloud resources to minimize waste. Our operations are digital-first, limiting paper usage and promoting remote work to reduce commuting emissions. We also align with partners who share our commitment to the environment, and actively contribute to initiatives focused on renewable energy and carbon offsetting. Our goal is to help build a sustainable digital future.

Pilotcore is a cloud services consulting company. We provide cloud strategy, cloud adoption and migration, architecture design and reviews, cost optimization, infrastructure management, application modernization, DevOps consulting, and more.

DevOps has the same meaning in the cloud that it does in other environments, the difference is the knowledge set and tooling. A DevOps engineer who specializes in cloud, such as a certified AWS DevOps Engineer Professional at Pilotcore, will have knowledge of the broad range of cloud-based tools that can be used to create automation pipelines and configure systems and infrastructure to support them. A cloud DevOps engineer is augmented with knowledge that brings you the kind of cost and automation efficiencies you are looking for when adopting the cloud.

The purpose of DevOps is to automate as much as possible. This automation reduces the number of human-hours dedicated to repetitive tasks, reduces human error and therefore expensive problems down the line, in the case of test automation it ensures that tests are run frequently on code commits which reduces bugs and improves customer satisfaction and experience, and in the case of infrastructure automation it can ensure that when disaster strikes, infrastructure can be redeployed quickly. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the functions of DevOps, but it should be clear that if after the initial automation setup which can take some time and effort to do, your team is more productive and less stressed-out, if they have time for building new features rather than putting out fires, if you're receiving fewer bug reports or complaints from customers, and if your overall costs are reduced due to these things, then you are experiencing DevOps success!

One of the goals of DevOps implementation is to increase the frequency of deployments. Having frequent, small deployments after robust automated tests can help your team break free of the heroic efforts required to deploy large releases. So one measure of DevOps delivery is in the degree to which you've increased your deployment frequency without also increasing bugs in production. If you make frequent deployments with few or no bugs, you're on the right track.

Automated deployment is a process that installs application code to servers and other resources for testing and end-user consumption without manual intervention. Deployment is usually initiated by events in source control systems like Git, such as merging of pull requests or new commits. The process is fully configurable and can include any number of steps before code is released to users in a production environment. Automated deployment is often referred to as CI/CD.

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Continuous integration refers to the automated process of testing new software changes as soon as possible after they are pushed to source control to quickly identify bugs and notify developers so they can be fixed. Continuous delivery is the process of packaging code after it has been tested in the previous step, and delivering it to a build repository. Continuous deployment refers to the final step of deploying those code builds to servers.

The cloud refers to platforms provided as a service and controlled through a web or command line interface that offer an array of compute, storage, other services at low cost and nearly instantly from anywhere in the world. The key idea behind it is that it offers the opportunity to take advantage of economies of scale to democratize access to powerful technologies, and the customer pays for what they use.

The cloud is essentially a collection of data centres spread throughout the world and accessible through these interfaces. It is so named because the customer never has to think about the hardware and data centres that the cloud platform uses to offer their services. Importantly, the client also doesn't have to make purchases of hardware and take the risks inherent in estimating requirements when building an on-premises data centre. With cloud, it's all available on-demand and at lower cost than on-premises.

Contact us to learn how we can help you take advantage of the cloud in your business.

Cloud computing helps all kinds of organizations in a number of different ways. One of the biggest benefits is reduced IT costs. By deploying applications and network infrastructure in the cloud, companies can reduce the IT footprint they must maintain on-premises.

Another benefit is flexibility in that when planning an on-premises data centre, one must purchase hardware based on estimates of current and future demand, including spikes, in order to ensure the infrastructure will be able to handle traffic. An incorrect estimate can result in downtime and unhappy customers and/or employees. By contrast when deploying to the cloud, resources are elastic and can be scaled up or down quickly to meet fluctuations in demand. You pay for what you use and can take advantage of different billing models like reserved instances, savings plans, and Spot instances to save money.

Another benefit is the ability to instantly go global. You can deploy your applications with low latency to edge locations throughout the world at the click of a button.

Yet another benefit is access to cutting edge technologies through economies of scale. Need to build a Blockchain solution? Need to use data from Satellites? Need to deploy a fleet of internet connected devices? Need artificial intelligence? Machine learning? Quantum computing? Robotics? AWS has it all for you at your fingertips. Try deploying all that in your on-premises data centre!

These benefits only scratch the surface, but it should be clear that the cloud offers far more than could be achieved through an in-house data centre.

There are a couple of different angles to this question. First, it's important to point out that the cloud is just a term for the platform-as-a-service offered by companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The cloud is just someone else's data centres that they manage and offer services to you on a pay-as-you-go model. So where is the data stored? On volumes managed by the cloud provider and depending on the type of storage, sometimes automatically replicated behind to the scenes to provide extremely high durability.

Another aspect to consider is where the physical hardware on which your data is stored, is located. In the case of many countries, there are rules around data residency and privacy, so you may have to consider this especially if you're dealing with sensitive health or financial data. Read more on data residency considerations from the point of view of Canadian legislation: Demystifying Canadian Data Residency and the Public Cloud.

This completely depends on your use case. The are general categories of storage such as block storage, file storage, and object storage. AWS customers can read more here: EBS vs EFS vs FSx vs S3: How These Storage Options Differ. Of course if you are referring to database storage, this also depends on your use case, but AWS offers different database engines throught their Relational Database Service (RDS) as well as NoSQL options like DynamoDB and DocumentDB (MongoDB Compatible), a well as Quantum Ledger and Neptune for more specific use cases. Contact us to discuss your scenario.

Every storage service in AWS and other cloud providers includes recommended strategies for backing up and restoring data. For example, S3 in AWS comes with extremely high levels of durability (99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year) meaning that over a given year you would only risk losing 0.000000001% of objects due to a hardware failure on the AWS-side. In other words, over a period of ten thousand years, if you were storing ten million objects (files) you might lose one single file. That's over ten thousand years! This really means S3, due to the way AWS has architected the service, is extremely reliable. If you wish, you can sync your S3 buckets to other regions within AWS in order to maintain a backup. In the case of other storage services like EBS, it's essential to create policies that automate backups regularly. Of course if you don't properly secure your resources in the cloud, your data could be lost due to malicious activity. Take care of security of your applications and data in the cloud in order to keep them protected.

The short answer is yes, files stored in the cloud can be lost, but if you choose the right service for the use-case, secure it correctly, and follow best practices to ensure backups are taken regularly it is unlikely that you will lose your data.

This is an interesting question, but one to which a formula can't really be applied. The key to answering it is in knowing what all your true costs really are in planning, building, servicing, replacing, staffing, etc, your on-premises data centre. Then consider that much of the human labour costs associated with managing a data centre aren't required with the cloud. But of course you still need knowledgeable cloud consultants to help plan and implement your architecture. Generally speaking, the cost of cloud computing incorporates all those additional expenses into a model that's faar easier and quicker to deploy and scale.

An AWS consulting partner works with each client and their budget to provide the best overall solution for your requirements. Whether you're migrating to the cloud for the first time, optimizing existing workloads, reducing your monthly bill, or automating processes, our team works with you to provide a successful and robust, cost-efficient outcome.

AWS has a range of services that are eligible for use in HIPAA compliant architectures. These services have been verified as suitable for use in HIPAA-compliant environments, but it is important to note that it is up to the customer to ensure their architecture has been built to HIPAA standards via a 3rd party audit. AWS offers an informative whitepaper on both HIPAA and HITECH (the Clinical Health Act).

The cost of hosting your applications in the cloud is dependent on the complexity of the workloads and the amount of resources they consume. AWS offers pay-as-you-go pricing so you pay only for what you use. The first step is to have a cloud architecture that is efficient for its purpose. Then if your applications have millions of monthly users vs thousands or hundreds, the cost will vary widely. Contact us to discuss your AWS project and we'll give you a better idea of what your unique workloads will cost to run.

In the context of cloud, architecture refers to the network design, permissions, firewall settings, security groups, data storage, compute resources, monitoring tools, disaster recovery plans, and other components that go into a cloud environment. A cloud architect will usually produce an architecture design based on client business and technical requirements that will be used by engineers for the build and migration. Cloud computing architecture should be completed and approved in advance of any implementation.

The cloud refers to compute, storage and other resources provided on-demand using pay-as-you-go billing. Underpinning the cloud is a network of highly secure data centres with physical hardware. The cloud offers three service models, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-service (SaaS).

The term "cloud native" refers to an application architecture using tools and principles unique to the cloud. Migrating to cloud native application architectures can be enormously rewarding. Please see our blog post What Is Cloud Native? A Primer for more information.

Infrastructure-as-code or IaC is the practice of using software tools like Terraform or AWS CDK to define cloud infrastructure in coded files that are then executed to create the defined resources. This enables a high level of transparency and ease of collaboration on building and maintaining cloud infrastructure because the code can be managed through source control systems like Git. Management of infrastructure using this model can also be automated through CI/CD pipelines.

There are two broad categories to consider regarding security of cloud services: security of the cloud, and security in the cloud.

Cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, are responsible for security of the cloud. This means that they ensure the facilities, hardware, software and networking in which their services run are secured. The customer by contrast is responsible for security in the cloud. This means that after the cloud platform provides us with resources to use, we are responsible for keeping our applications and data secure. We do this with sound cloud architecture using encryption in transit and at rest, using secure passwords, network ACLs and security groups, proper authentication and authorization, etc.