About Me
I'm Alex Hovel — an Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer with over 15 years of experience spanning enterprise datacenters, cloud architecture, and self-hosted infrastructure.
I currently operate 16+ EKS clusters at Charter Communications while building and running a production-grade homelab that serves as both a learning platform and a real engineering environment. I believe the best engineers understand systems end-to-end — from the hardware and networking layer through containerization and orchestration to the application and monitoring stack.
Cat Compute LLC is my personal engineering brand and freelance practice. Every project on this site was built on infrastructure I designed, deployed, and operate. I'm a strong advocate for AI-augmented development — this portfolio itself was built in collaboration with Kiro, demonstrating how AI tools amplify engineering output without replacing engineering judgment.
Experience
Charter Communications
DevOps Engineer IV
Nov 2023 – Present
- Own and operate 16+ EKS clusters across 4 AWS accounts with blue/green deployment orchestration and zero-downtime releases
- Lead Graviton/ARM64 migration — multi-arch container builds, Karpenter scheduling, workload validation
- Architect GitLab CI pipelines with reusable CI components and multi-environment promotion chains
- Design self-hosted GitLab Runner infrastructure — custom AMIs, ASG autoscaling, SSM config injection
- Develop Terraform modules (S3, IRSA, Lambda, WAF) for multi-account infrastructure
- Manage Istio service mesh — ingress gateways, mTLS, traffic policies across all environments
- Drive monthly CVE lifecycle management — AWS Inspector analysis, triage, and remediation
- Mentor engineers on infrastructure standards, CI/CD practices, and operational runbooks
MedStudy Corp
Lead DevOps Engineer
June 2023 – Nov 2023
DevOps Engineer: Oct 2020 – May 2023
- Coordinated team projects and communicated cross-team needs to leadership
- Designed and maintained AWS Cloud infrastructure using Terraform
- Managed AWS budgets and billing with cost optimization analysis
- Implemented Always-On VPN (Microsoft RAS, NDES, NPS Radius, PKI)
- Maintained Kubernetes (Rancher OS), Docker, Grafana, Hybrid AD infrastructure
- Created team initiatives and quarterly planning as lead
Kore Wireless
Systems Engineer III
July 2018 – Oct 2020
- Designed and maintained global enterprise storage and compute infrastructure
- Administered SANs — Dell EQL, IBM Storwize, HP Nimble (iSCSI + Fiber Channel)
- Maintained ESX, vCenter, Zabbix, Grafana, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, RabbitMQ
- Global datacenter deployments — coordinating onsite techs across time zones
- Disaster recovery planning with Veeam backup solutions
Rotex Global, LLC
IT Department — Various Roles
Jan 2017 – July 2018
- Managed hardware lifecycle — servers, workstations, network equipment
- Windows Server administration (2003, 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016)
- Created workflows for system state management and preventative maintenance
- Network, storage, AD, SCCM, MDT, VPN, backups
Volunteer Leadership
Odyssey of the Mind — State Problem Captain
2016 – 2022
Trained volunteers, coordinated competition sites, judged Regional and State competitions throughout Kentucky.
Photo coming soon
Quick Facts
- Role
- DevOps Engineer IV
- Company
- Charter Communications
- LLC
- Cat Compute
- Experience
- 15+ years
- Education
- BS CIT, NKU
- Available
- Yes
Education
Northern Kentucky University
BS Computer Information Technology
Minor in Computer Science • Dec 2016