Cloud Infrastructure

Most SMBs we assess — in Canada and the US — are overspending 20–45% on cloud — usually from oversized instances, idle resources, missing autoscaling, no savings plans or reserved instances, and untiered storage. Our Cloud & Architecture Assessment quantifies the waste with hard numbers against your actual bill, and the FinOps changes typically pay for the engagement within the first one to three months.

There is no universal winner; the right choice depends on your stack and team. AWS has the broadest service catalogue and talent pool. Azure is often the pragmatic pick if you already live in Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. GCP is strong for data, Kubernetes, and analytics-heavy workloads. We are cloud-neutral with no reseller commissions — we recommend the platform your team can actually operate, and we flag the lock-in tradeoffs of each before you commit.

Usually not — and we will tell you so. Kubernetes is powerful but carries real operational overhead that most teams under 50 people should not take on prematurely. For many SMBs, managed containers (ECS, Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps) or even serverless deliver the same outcome with a fraction of the maintenance. We recommend Kubernetes only when your scale, multi-team needs, or portability requirements genuinely justify it.

A typical SMB migration runs 6–16 weeks depending on workload count, data volume, and how much technical debt comes along. We start with a 2-week assessment, then migrate in phases with a decision gate after each — so you are never committed to a multi-month plan that cannot adapt. Simple lift-and-shift moves faster; re-architecting for cost and reliability takes longer but pays off.

Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or OpenTofu — we pick the tool that fits your team) means your cloud environment is defined in version-controlled files rather than clicked together by hand in a console. It makes environments reproducible, reviewable, and recoverable — you can rebuild from scratch, spin up identical staging, and audit every change. It is the single biggest factor in whether your infrastructure stays maintainable as you grow, which is why every engagement ships it.

Lock-in is a deliberate design decision, not an accident. We favour open standards and portable patterns — containers, infrastructure-as-code, managed databases with standard engines — and we document exactly where you are taking on a proprietary dependency and why it is worth it. The goal is infrastructure you own and could move if you had to, not a setup that holds your roadmap hostage.

CTO-led. A senior technologist owns the architecture and the tradeoffs — instance choices, reliability targets, cost guardrails, security baseline — and is accountable to your business outcome, not just a ticket queue. That is the difference between a body-shop that builds whatever you ask and a partner who builds infrastructure you will not outgrow in six months. When we hand off, your team can run it without us.

Sometimes. Routine setup and migration usually do not qualify, but work involving genuine technological uncertainty — novel architectures, custom platform tooling, or experimental performance and reliability engineering — often can. We document the engagement (uncertainty, experiments, time) to support a claim where applicable and recommend pairing with a specialized SR&ED accountant to file it.

Pricing follows our engagement ladder. The $2,000 Technology Health Check (with the automated cost and security scan) is the entry; advisory is from $2,750/month; hands-on is from $8,000/month (an embedded fractional CTO); and a full one-time build or migration — fractional CTO plus engineers at $50–$100/hour — typically runs $20K–$70K depending on scope and workload count. These are typical averages for planning only — actual cost is assessed per project and scope, and is not a guaranteed price. We share concrete numbers on the first call after a quick look at your environment.