His father worked as both an engineer and computing teacher, and Alex grew up watching sci-fi and playing with computers.
He built his first computer around age eight, and by age 12 had gained several qualifications in PC servicing. Alex later went on to study Cybernetics and Control Engineering in the University of Reading, funding himself through student loans, grants, and bursaries.
Upon graduating in 2010, Alex worked for a software company, developing tools for recruitment agencies and HR departments. Starting as a Technical Support Analyst, he moved through multiple roles in the company before taking a Systems Administration role, looking after desktops, networking, and servers.
After receiving an invite from a housemate to volunteer as a mentor at an STFC event, Alex became interested in the exciting work being done to enable scientific advancements, and applied for a position at STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Hired as a systems administrator, Alex began his time at STFC Scientific Computing eight years ago.
He now leads the team operating the STFC Cloud, and is responsible for setting the technical direction for Cloud Operations. Alex's favourite part of the role is seeing his team working on new things that help to enable the scientific outputs of the Cloud users.
He said, “This was especially interesting through the COVID-19 pandemic, helping the Xchem group at the Diamond Light Source with their work on identifying possible drugs used in the virus's treatment. “
The work done in the Cloud Operations group can be challenging, with the task of delivering computing requirements to a wide range of user communities and ensuring everything is fully updated, while also delivering the Cloud availability each community requires.
Designing infrastructures such as the STFC Cloud is difficult at the best of times, but Alex has done a remarkable job, increasing the ease of access to virtual machines for scientists and engineers in a myriad of scientific fields and supporting a broad range of research across STFC facilities and beyond.
Alex has led Scientific Computing's Cloud team since 2016, becoming Group Leader when Cloud Operations was formally established in 2020. The STFC Cloud has quadrupled in size during that time and there is a huge, and rapidly growing, demand for Cloud Operations' services. The group delivers multiple solutions for the challenges being tackled by the vast numbers of users from other STFC departments and projects, as well as multiple university-based researchers.
Under Alex's leadership the group launched a cloud-based digital training platform to train new researchers, apprentices and other users. This has been immensely popular, with more than 500 staff and facility users trained in the last 18 months.
The group plans to use a new digital software editing tool developed through IRIS, a cooperative community-driven project helping develop and grow STFC's digital research infrastructure and network security capabilities. The group will also introduce new features, such as enabling users to acquire space on a physical server in the STFC Data Centre, rather than through a virtual machine.
Future plans include the Cloud once again expanding in the coming months, to double its current size. To cope with the ever-increasing size and demand for cloud services, the group itself will also need to expand, so new permanent positions and apprenticeship opportunities will soon be advertised.
As for Alex, he sees himself continuing to lead Cloud Operations in the long-term. And with the future volume of growth required for the STFC Cloud, he'll certainly have his hands full.
