Former Red Hat Technology Chief Brian Stevens has surfaced as Google's Head of Cloud Platforms, a couple of weeks after suddenly leaving his former job.

At Red Hat, Stevens led the open source giant's cloud efforts, including the company's strong support of the OpenStack specification for open source cloud platforms. At the end of August, Red Hat announced his departure in a terse press release giving no indication of where he was going or why. It was widely expected he'd had an offer he couldn't refuse, and this turned out to be the case.

Stevens is now VP of Cloud Platforms at Google, although the news is so far only revealed on his LinkedIn profile. Google's Cloud Platforms blog is silent on the matter.

Appointing Stevens shows Google is serious about taking on Amazon in the cloud, and his open source credentials suggest we may see a more open approach from the search giant. However, although Google is a member of OpenStack, it has faced criticism for not basing its Compute Engine on the open source platform.

Stevens spent 13 years at Red Hat. Another long-timer, Paul Cormier, is filling the CTO chair there till a replacement is found.