This page lists the members of the Cloud Operations Group, including their Job role and the area they have skills in.
Alex Dibbo - Group Leader / Technical Architect
Alex works as the leader of the Cloud Operations Group (COG) and is the technical architect for the STFC Cloud service. He has been with STFC since November 2014 and has been working on the Cloud for most of that. He is responsible for pushing the service forwards and is the primary person procuring hardware for the Cloud. His (literal or metaphorical) door is almost always open
Skills: OpenStack, Linux, Bash, Python(badly), Networking (particularly Cumulus), Configuration Management (aquilon), many other things (ask me a question and I’ll try to help)
John Good - Delivery Manager
John is an experienced service manager and project manager. Prior to joining the STFC Cloud Operations Group in early 2020, John managed the Facilities IT Service Desk at RAL, and has also worked in data curation and management services, both for private enterprise as well as public bodies such as NERC CEDA.
John’s role focusses on the services offered by the Cloud group and he has overall responsibility for ensuring the STFC Cloud meets its delivery commitments to the user community. John also deputises for Alex and works with him and other senior members of the group to develop and implement strategic decisions and policies for the Cloud in order to meet the evolving needs of STFC Cloud user requirements. Additionally, John is a site administrator for Atlassian tools at STFC and he regularly participates in CAB meetings at both SCD and STFC levels. John is always pleased to help anyone he can, to listen to new ideas and to share information.
Skills: Service Management, Project Management, Windows sys admin, Linux user, Atlassian STFC site admin.
Jacob Ward - Operations Lead
Jacob is the Operations team lead, meaning he is responsible for the smooth day to day technical running of the platform. This means ensuring all control plane elements are functional, managing the state of cloud hypervisors, diagnosing and fixing problems, and organising work around the lifecycle of the platform such as commissioning and decommissioning. Jacob is also responsible for platform security and incident response, as well as training new team members various operations tasks and technologies and is happy to talk or answer any questions you may have. He joined STFC on the SCD Graduate scheme in 2017 and joined Cloud Operations full time at the start of 2020.
Skills: Linux, Bash, Openstack, Security (Vulnerability Analysis, Incident Response, Forensics, Mitigation), User Support, Hardware (Improving), Networking (Generic - Basics/Intermediate)
David Fairbrother - DevOps Lead
David is the DevOps team lead. This is a fancy way of saying he automates tasks so other people have more time to do interesting things instead. He's been with STFC since 2016, originally at ISIS on a sandwich and graduate placement, he joined the COG team as the DevOps lead at the start of 2022.
With a background in software engineering, he's usually the one who asks for boring things such as unit tests and CI/CD. But he's also happy to use the the try-it and pray see approach to figure things out or test new things. Usually found talking, he's always happy to help with any questions you might have, usually programming or Kubernetes related, but it can be about anything you want talk about.
Skills: Programming (Python / C / C++ / Java / Kotlin / Bash ...etc.), Git, Ansible, Aquilon, CI + CD, Docker + Kubernetes, JupyterHub, StackStorm, Harbor, talking and probably more...
Martin Summers - Senior Systems Administrator
Martin spends his time helping to develop “workshops” for our cloud customers, using the technical help of the other team members to author the material and help present it at workshop events. He also spends time on helping to fix user reported issues logged via our helpdesk system, and also helps with the lifecycle management of the hardware footprint of equipment the STFC cloud uses. Also has an active interest in helping others learn new things…and learning new things himself.
Skills: UNIX,Linux, Networks, new and old Hardware, Openstack, Electronics, Radio, Project Management, Persuasion, Facilitator, programming (poorly!)…. and many other things.
Santosh Rane - Systems Administrator
Santosh works as Systems Administrator in the Cloud operations team. He is responsible for ensuring that cloud services run smoothly. As part of this role, He handles user-related issues, cloud security, deployment of new services, as well as handling any software/hardware updates and any problems that may arise.
Skills: Unix, Linux, OpenStack, Storage, ITIL, Technical Support, Security, documentation.
Megan O’Flynn - DevOps Engineer
Megan works as a DevOps Engineer based in the group’s DevOps team, and is involved in helping with development of the STFC Cloud. They do a mixture of development work, including investigating and testing OpenStack components such as Manila, preparing the JupyterHub Platform for training courses, and building dashboards for monitoring in Grafana. They first joined the group for a 6 month project rotation in 2020 as part of the STFC Graduate Scheme, and re-joined the group as a DevOps Engineer in October 2022.
Skills: OpenStack, Manila, Kubernetes, JupyterHub, Grafana, NetBox, Python, some knowledge of Java, documentation
Chris Green - Cloud Operations SKA Liaison
Chris is the Cloud group’s SKA (Square Kilometre Array) liaison, and is involved in supporting the cloud computation needs of SKA. They do a mixture of operations ticket work and development work, including the internal deployment of Guacamole and Azimuth. They joined the cloud group in March 2023 as a part of the PhD conversion scheme.
Skills: Python, Fortran, basic ticket work, remote desktop, bash scripting, documentation.
Alan Huggan - STFC-Senior Linux System Administrator
Alan works as Senior Systems Administrator in the Cloud operations team. He has a background in systems infrastructure which means he is well placed to help with the install and commissioning of new hardware. As part of the Cloud Ops team his responsibilities include providing support to the Cloud users and maintaining the operational status of the Cloud OpenStack Services. https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Huggan,-Alan.aspx
Skills: OpenVMS, Windows AD, Linux RHEL, VMware vSphere, VMware Integrated OpenStack, S3 Object Storage, Block Storage, Networking.
Anish Mudaraddi - DevOps Engineer
Anish works as a DevOps Engineer as part of the DevOps team. They joined the cloud team in March 2023. Mainly on the development side of things. Currently working on improving the StackStorm service. He is also involved in several other projects including setting up energy monitoring on Cloud Hypervisors and Service nodes, setting up Prometheus monitoring on CAPI clusters and developing a Python library wrapper around Openstacksdk to allow easier and more versatile querying.
Skills: Python, Git, Software & Testing Practices, Linux, Go (aiming to improve), StackStorm, Opensearch, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Docker
Ramzi Jalili
Ramzi works as an ops/devops apprentice. He joined the cloud team in October 2022. He has done work on developing the monitoring tool Prometheus alongside the database counterpart and Victoria Metrics. He has also done some work around scripting for openstack in python. He has had sufficient experience working with Aquilon and deploying services within it.
Skills: Aquilon, Prometheus, Python, Docker, Kubernetes