There have been many Intel Linux/open-source software engineers to leave the company over the past year among other setbacks for their Linux/open-source initiatives. Announced this Friday night is one of their highest profile departures of the year as it pertains to their Linux efforts.
Brendan Gregg announced he has resigned from Intel. Brendan Gregg was hired in at Intel three years ago straight as an Intel Fellow. For most longtime Linux users he likely needs no introduction. But for those unfamiliar, he is the creator of the widely-used FlameGraphs for visualizations, contributed significant to Linux performance engineering during his 12 years at Netflix prior to Intel, worked significantly on eBPF, and during his Sun Microsystems days worked on DTrace and ZFS. He’s done a lot for the Linux ecosystem and open-source at large over the past two decades.
Among his recent works at Intel was developing “AI Flame Graphs” and making it open-source:
Brendan Gregg announced a few minutes ago he resigned from Intel and is accepting a new opportunity elsewhere. Where he is heading to next has yet to be named.
In his post entitled “Leaving Intel” he noted one of his last works at Intel was spearheading an effort to try to help Intel win back cloud computing:
“I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations. It is some of my best work and features a visual map of interactions between all 19 relevant teams, described by Intel long-timers as the first time they have ever seen such a cross-company map. (This strategy, summarized in a slide deck, is internal only.)
…
My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations, which Intel can continue to do in my absence. Most of my recommendations aren’t easy, however, and require accepting change, ELT/CEO approval, and multiple quarters of investment. I won’t be there to push them, but other employees can (my CloudTeams strategy is in the inbox of various ELT, and in a shared folder with all my presentations, code, and weekly status reports). This work will hopefully live on and keep making Intel stronger. Good luck.”
Will be interesting to see if that work bears fruit in the future for making Intel stronger in cloud computing.
Brendan Gregg leaving Intel is a big loss for their Linux/open-source efforts on top of all their other departures and software project changes the past year. Will be interesting to see where he ends up next.
