Former Red Hat executive Brian Stevens lands at Google

If you didn't think that Google was deadly serious about taking out Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the top public cloud company and making sure that Microsoft Azure never has a chance to become a hybrid cloud power, think again. With the hiring of Red Hat's former CTO Brian Stevens as its vice-president of cloud platforms, Google serves notice to the cloud world that Google wants to be number one cloud provider.

While not officially announced yet, Stevens' LinkedIn profile lists his new title. Under Steven's guidance, Red Hat became a major OpenStack power and led the way to bringing Docker containers to Red Hat.

At Google, Stevens will use his abilities to bring Google’s Compute Engine (GCE) to the forefront of the enterprise cloud. While GCE's not based on OpenStack, it's otherwise a natural next step for Stevens.

GCE natively supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). It also supports a variety of other Linux distributions such as CoreOS, Debian, and CentOS. GCE, like RHEL, also now supports Docker containers.

There's more to Google's plans than just GCE's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. Google also offers Platform as a Service (PaaS), Google App Engine and Cloud DataFlow for Big Data analysis.

Managing all of this will be a big job, but, given his track record, I think Stevens will be up for the challenge.

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• Google and Mesosphere bring Mesos clusters with Docker to Google Cloud Platform
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