InstanceNorPilot started in 2019 when two systems administrators at a Caen-based telecom integrator decided they were spending more time writing internal support ticket templates than actually fixing infrastructure. They quit and started a company with a clear enough premise: manage cloud environments for a small number of clients, keep the team small enough that every client always reaches the person who knows their setup, and charge a flat rate so nobody's reading the fine print every month.
The name comes from a concept in aviation — a pilot who stays with the plane through the whole flight rather than handing off mid-route. It's a reasonable description of what we actually do.
We stayed small deliberately. In 2022, when it would have been straightforward to take on a growth round and hire a sales team, we didn't. We've grown by word of mouth and occasional referrals from clients who moved to new companies. The current team is eight people: six engineers, one person handling billing and client onboarding, and one handling internal tooling. That's intentional.
Most of our clients are SMEs in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands — dev teams between five and eighty people who moved onto a hyperscaler early and never built the internal expertise to manage it well, or who need EU data residency and found the big providers' compliance documentation difficult to work with. We're not trying to compete with AWS or OVHcloud on scale. We're trying to be the team that ten or twenty clients can actually reach when something breaks.
Our infrastructure runs in Caen and two additional French data centres. All client data stays in the EU. We don't subcontract management to third parties.