Cloud Infrastructure That Doesn't Bankrupt You
We design, migrate, and operate cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, and Azure without the runaway-bill horror story. Terraform from day one, IAM that a security audit survives, multi-region where it matters, and a FinOps review every month so you know exactly where the money goes. No clickops. No hero engineers. No surprise invoices.
You don't need another cloud consultant.
You need the bill to stop growing.
Most cloud projects start with a whiteboard full of services and end with an invoice nobody wants to open. We\u2019ve walked into enough AWS accounts to know the pattern: clickops infrastructure nobody can reproduce, a single us-east-1 region that becomes a single point of failure, IAM roles last touched in 2021, and a bill where 30% of line items have no owner. We build cloud that\u2019s boring, reproducible, and priced on purpose.
The AWS bill doubled and nobody knows why
NAT gateway traffic, idle RDS, orphaned EBS volumes, cross-AZ data transfer, CloudWatch logs nobody reads. A $40K invoice where half the line items have no owner, and every engineer is too scared to turn anything off.
One region, one AZ, one SPOF
The startup grew up. Everything still runs in a single us-east-1 availability zone. When it goes down — and it will — you find out you have no runbook, no DR plan, and a RTO of "however long the on-call takes to wake up".
Infrastructure built in the console
Twelve months of clickops. Nothing in Terraform. The one engineer who built it left in March. Now every change is a risk, every audit is a nightmare, and "what is this security group for" has no answer.
What You Actually Get
No vague deliverables. Here's exactly what lands in your hands.
Infra as code, in your repo
Terraform or Pulumi, modularized, with a state backend you control, a CI pipeline, plan/apply reviews, and drift detection. Your next engineer can reproduce production in an afternoon.
IAM and network that survive an audit
Least-privilege IAM, SSO via Okta / Entra / Workspace, VPC with private subnets, flow logs, GuardDuty, Security Hub or SCC on. A written security baseline you can hand to SOC2 or ISO auditors.
A FinOps dashboard and a monthly review
Tagged resources, per-team and per-service cost, anomaly alerts, Savings Plans / CUDs sized and bought. A monthly review meeting where the numbers on the dashboard match the invoice.
A DR plan you've actually tested
Backups with a tested restore path, a written runbook, a documented RTO and RPO, and a game-day where we break something on purpose and watch you recover. Not a PDF nobody opens.
A Real Cloud Engineering Team
Cloud done well is a team sport. Six roles you get on every Pillai Infotech cloud engagement.
FinOps Lead
Tags every resource, builds the cost dashboard, negotiates Savings Plans and committed-use discounts, catches the $8K/month NAT gateway before it becomes an $80K/year NAT gateway.
IaC Architect
Terraform-only discipline. Module structure, state backend, drift detection, plan-review workflow. Writes the code so your next engineer can read it six months from now without a seance.
Security & IAM Specialist
Least-privilege IAM, SCP / org policies, KMS strategy, secrets rotation, audit logging, GuardDuty / Security Center. Owns the "can this survive a pen test" answer.
SRE / Reliability Engineer
Defines SLOs, wires Prometheus and Grafana or Datadog, owns the on-call handoff, designs the runbook, runs the first game-day, and teaches your team how to hold the pager after.
Data Platform Engineer
RDS / Cloud SQL / Aurora tuning, backup and PITR, replica topology, warehouse on Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift, and the boring ETL plumbing in between.
Multi-Cloud Reality Checker
Tells you honestly when multi-cloud is worth the complexity tax and when it's a budget bonfire. Most clients don't need it. A few do. We tell you which you are.
You See Everything. In Real Time.
Every Pillai Infotech project comes with a dedicated client dashboard. Kanban boards, live logs, test results, meeting notes — it's all visible the moment it happens. No status-report theatre, no "we'll get back to you", no surprises at the demo. You work with us like you work with your own team.
Kanban Board, Live
Every epic, every story, every task — visible on your dashboard. Drag, comment, reprioritize. It's the same board our team works from.
Documented Everything
Every decision, spec, API contract, and architecture diagram lives in the dashboard. Searchable, versioned, linked to the tasks they shaped.
Live Logs & Test Results
Build logs, deployment logs, test suite results — streamed to your dashboard the moment they run. You never have to ask "did the build pass?"
Meetings → Tasks, Automatically
Every meeting is recorded, transcribed, and every action point is auto-converted into a tracked task assigned to the right person. Nothing gets lost between calls.
Sprint Burndown & Velocity
See exactly how much work is done, how much remains, and our velocity over time. If a sprint is slipping, you see it the same moment we do.
Comment, Approve, Decide — In-Place
Comment on any task, approve designs, sign off on specs, and raise blockers directly in the dashboard. Everything tied to the work, not buried in email threads.
Cloud Engagements We Know How to Deliver
From day-one greenfield to day-1,000 cost rescue. We pick the shape to match the mess.
🌱 Greenfield cloud foundations
New AWS / GCP / Azure org, landing zone, SSO, VPC, baseline security, CI/CD and the first workload deployed. Built so the next 50 engineers don't have to rebuild it.
🚚 On-prem to cloud migration
Datacenter lift-and-shift, refactor, or replatform — with a clear-eyed analysis of what's worth moving and what should just be rewritten. No "set a date and pray".
🌍 Multi-region HA builds
Active-active or active-passive across regions with tested failover, global load balancing, cross-region replication, and an RTO/RPO you can put in your MSA.
💵 Cost-rescue engagements
Fixed 30-day engagement. We go through your bill line by line, find the waste, ship the fixes, and write the FinOps playbook so the savings stick after we leave.
🛟 Disaster recovery & game-days
DR design, runbook, backup verification, and a scheduled game-day where we break production on purpose and watch you recover. Proof, not theater.
📋 Compliance-ready infrastructure
SOC2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, RBI / DPDP. Audit trails, encryption, logging, access reviews, evidence collection automated. We've been through the audits.
The Cloud Stack We Use
We're cloud-provider agnostic in principle and opinionated in practice. Here's what we reach for.
Cloud Providers
Infrastructure as Code
Containers & Orchestration
Observability & FinOps
A Six-Stage Cloud Delivery Process
We've seen enough cloud projects go sideways to know where they go sideways. We don't skip these.
Cloud Audit & Cost Baseline
Read-only access to your account. We map every resource, tag ownership, profile the bill, find the immediate wins, and write up what we find. Two weeks, fixed price.
Target Architecture & IaC Plan
What the end state looks like — regions, networks, identity, data, observability. Terraform module plan. Migration or remediation sequence. Risks and trade-offs in writing.
Landing Zone & Guardrails
Org structure, SSO, baseline IAM, network backbone, logging, and guardrails (SCPs / org policies / Azure policies). The boring foundation everything else sits on.
Workload Migration / Build
Application by application, with Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and runbooks shipped alongside. No workload goes live without monitoring and a rollback path.
Game-Day & Handover
We break something on purpose — kill a node, fail a region, pull a database — and watch your team recover with the runbook. Gaps get fixed before we hand over.
FinOps & Ongoing Review
Monthly cost review, Savings Plans / CUD sizing, anomaly alerts, right-sizing, and a quarterly architecture review to catch drift before it becomes an outage.
Three Ways to Engage
Cloud work comes in different shapes. Pick the one that matches your situation.
Cloud Audit & Cost Rescue
Fixed four-week engagement to audit your cloud, cut the waste, and leave you with a FinOps playbook you can run without us.
- Full bill and architecture audit
- Quick-win cost cuts shipped
- Written report + playbook
Cloud Foundation Build
End-to-end landing zone, IaC, security baseline, CI/CD, observability and first workload migrated or built.
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Typical: 8–16 weeks
- Includes 30-day post-launch support
Fractional Platform Team
An embedded cloud / SRE squad operating your infrastructure alongside your engineers, on call if you want it.
- IaC + SRE + security + FinOps
- Monthly retainer, scale up/down
- Best for: teams without a platform lead
Honest Answers to Cloud Reality Questions
The questions every smart buyer asks before signing. Here's what we tell them.
Single cloud or multi-cloud?
Single, unless you have a specific reason. Multi-cloud sounds resilient on a slide and costs you two teams, two toolchains, two sets of bugs, and twice the audit surface. Most clients get more resilience out of multi-region inside one provider than multi-cloud across three. We'll tell you honestly which camp you're in.
Who owns the AWS / GCP / Azure account?
You do. Always. Account in your company name, root credentials in your vault, billing to your card or PO. We get IAM access on our own named users (or federated via your SSO) with audit logs. If we walk away, you change our access; nothing breaks.
What happens if the engineer who built this leaves?
Nothing, ideally. That's why everything is in Terraform in your repo, with modules that your next engineer can read, a README with the architecture, and runbooks for every on-call scenario. No knowledge lives only in one head — we treat bus factor as a deliverable.
How do you prevent surprise cost spikes?
Budgets and anomaly alerts wired in on day one. Per-service and per-team tagging so you know who owns a spike. NAT-gateway data transfer, S3 egress, idle RDS, and untagged resources get flagged weekly. And a monthly FinOps review where a human looks at the line items, not just the dashboard.
Do you actually test disaster recovery?
Yes. Every HA engagement ships with a scheduled game-day where we intentionally kill nodes, databases, or entire regions in a lower environment, and your team runs the runbook in real time. DR plans that haven't been tested aren't DR plans — they're fiction.
Is Kubernetes the right choice for us?
Often no. Kubernetes is powerful and expensive in engineering time. If your workload fits on ECS Fargate, Cloud Run, or App Runner, you'll ship faster and pay less. We reach for Kubernetes when the workload actually needs it — heterogenous services, custom networking, scale — and we'll tell you when it doesn't.
Can you work inside our compliance regime?
Yes — SOC2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, DPDP. We've been through the audits. Expect CloudTrail / Audit Logs on, KMS customer-managed keys, encryption in transit and at rest, access reviews automated, and evidence collection scripted.
How long does a migration from on-prem actually take?
A straightforward lift-and-shift of 10–20 workloads: 3–6 months. Replatforming with refactors: 6–12 months. Anyone quoting you six weeks hasn't done it before. We give you a phase-by-phase plan with go / no-go gates, and we'll tell you which workloads aren't worth migrating at all.
What about vendor lock-in?
Some lock-in is worth it (managed RDS, S3, Cloud SQL, BigQuery). Some isn't (proprietary orchestration, obscure managed services). We're opinionated about where to use the cloud's native strengths and where to keep things portable, and we'll document the trade-offs so your CTO can sign off with eyes open.
Can you sign an NDA before we share access?
Always. NDA before the first call. Read-only access before the audit. Write access only once we've scoped the work and have change approval. You're in control of every credential at every step.