Bio

I hate writing bios. From time to time, conference organizers, journalists, and publishers ask me for a bio of a certain length ("50-75 words, "around 100 words", etc), and so I'll cache my most recent ones here. This page also has my upcoming talks.

Very Short

Industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. Solves hard problems. Makes things faster.

Short (<75 words)

Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall, and received the USENIX LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. Brendan has created performance analysis tools included in multiple operating systems, and visualizations and methodologies for performance analysis, including flame graphs.

Medium (around 100 words)

Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of multiple technical books including Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall, and received the USENIX LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. He has also worked as a kernel engineer and performance lead, and developed the ZFS L2ARC and led performance tuning efforts. Brendan has created performance analysis tools included in multiple operating systems, and visualizations and methodologies for performance analysis, including flame graphs.

Long

Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does large scale computer performance design, analysis, and tuning. This work includes evaluating new technologies and opportunities, and provides performance expertise to guide major changes and projects. This can involve any application, at any level of the stack, and for cloud instances and physical servers.

At Netflix, Brendan has developed and used analysis tools for the JDK hotspot and Node.js v8 runtimes, the Linux and FreeBSD kernels, the Xen hypervisor, Linux containers, and Docker. He has expertise with and has made contributions to multiple technologies, including Linux perf, ftrace, enhanced BPF, PMCs, ZFS, and DTrace. He has developed, debugged, and tuned software in rings 0, 1, and 3.

Brendan has also assisted production triage for performance and availability issues, and has been the primary on-call engineer (on the CORE site reliability engineering team rotation) to lead the worldwide response for Netflix outages.

His previous roles have included kernel and performance engineering. While working at Sun Microsystems, he led performance efforts for the world's first ZFS-based storage appliance, helping make it the fastest product of its class. He also developed the ZFS L2ARC – a pioneering file system performance technology which uses flash memory as a second level cache, after main memory.

He is the author of the book "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" (Prentice Hall, 2013), the primary author of "DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD" (Prentice Hall, 2011), and co-author of "Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and mdb techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris" (Prentice Hall, 2006), and well as numerous articles about systems performance. For contributions to the field of system administration, particularly his work in systems performance analysis methodologies, he is the recipient of the USENIX 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration.

Brendan has invented and developed numerous advanced performance analysis tools, methodologies, and visualizations. Many of his tools, especially DTrace scripts, are shipped by default in Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Oracle Solaris 11, and are used by other performance analysis products. He created and developed the DTraceToolkit, a collection of advanced performance analysis tools. He also created the perf-tools collection of advanced ftrace-based performance analysis tools for Linux, and contributed many similar tools to the eBPF-based bcc open source project.

His recent work has included new performance methodologies and visualizations for Linux kernel analysis, and performance tools for both Linux and FreeBSD. His methodologies include the USE method, off-CPU analysis, and the TSA method, and his visualizations include latency, utilization, and sub-second offset heat maps, and flame graphs.

Born in Australia and later working in the Asia Pacific region, he has lived in the US since 2006. (In case my bio inspires other Australians or non-US citizens to consider working in the US, then I'd recommend that you get a green card beforehand, else consider remote work instead of a more restrictive visa.)

For selected examples of my work, see my portfolio page.

Interviews

• BookFlocks, about technical books (2014).
• The Setup, on usesthis.com, about what software and hardware I use (2014).
• USENIX, by Rikki Endsley, after winning the LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement (2013).

Talks

Upcoming talks:

• O'Reilly Velocity 2017 Jun 20-22, San Jose

Conferences I will or have spoken at. Mouse-over for names (tooltip), click for websites:

Prior conference talks include (see my homepage for slides and video):

1. "Container Performance Analysis", Brendan Gregg, DockerCon, Austin 2017
2. "Linux 4.x Tracing: Performance Analysis with bcc/BPF", Brendan Gregg, Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE15x), Los Angeles 2017
3. "BPF Tools", Brendan Gregg, IO Visor Summit, Mountain View 2017
4. "Linux Monitoring at Scale with eBPF", Alex Maestretti, Brendan Gregg, BsidesSF, San Francisco 2017
5. "BPF: Tracing and More", Brendan Gregg, linux.conf.au, Hobart, Australia 2017
6. "Linux 4.x Tracing Tools: Using BPF Superpowers", Brendan Gregg, USENIX/LISA, Boston 2016
7. "Designing Tracing Tools", Brendan Gregg, Sysdig CCWFS, San Francisco 2016
8. "Java Performance Analysis on Linux with Flame Graphs", Brendan Gregg, JavaOne, San Francisco 2016
9. "System Methodology - Holistic Performance Analysis on Modern Systems" (keynote), Brendan Gregg, ACM Applicative, New York 2016
10. "Linux Systems Performance", Brendan Gregg, PerconaLive, Santa Clara 2016
11. "Performance Checklists for SREs", Brendan Gregg, USENIX SREcon, Santa Clara 2016
12. "Linux 4.x Performance: Using BPF Superpowers", Brendan Gregg, Performance@Scale, Menlo Park 2016
13. "Broken Linux Performance Tools", Brendan Gregg, Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE14x), Los Angeles 2016
14. "Broken Performance Tools", Brendan Gregg, QCon, San Francisco 2015
15. "Java Mixed-Mode Flame Graphs", Brendan Gregg, JavaOne, San Francisco 2015
16. "Netflix Instance Performance Analysis Requirements", Brendan Gregg, Monitorama, Portland 2015
17. "Linux Profiling at Netflix", Brendan Gregg, Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE13x), Los Angeles 2015
18. "Linux Performance Analysis: New Tools and Old Secrets", Large Installation System Administration (LISA/USENIX), Seattle 2014
19. "Performance Tuning EC2 Instances", Brendan Gregg, AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas 2014
20. "FreeBSD Flame Graphs", Brendan Gregg, FreeBSD Developer and Vendor Summit, San Jose 2014
21. "Performance Analysis", Brendan Gregg, MeetBSD California, San Jose 2014
22. "Linux Performance Tools", Brendan Gregg, LinuxCon | CloudOpen Europe, Düsseldorf 2014
23. "From DTrace to Linux", Brendan Gregg, Tracing Summit, Düsseldorf 2014
24. "From Clouds to Roots", Brendan Gregg, SurgeCon, Baltimore 2014
25. "Linux Performance Tools", Brendan Gregg, LinuxCon | CloudOpen North America, Chicago 2014
26. "Analyzing OS X Systems Performance with the USE Method", Brendan Gregg, MacIT, San Francisco 2014
27. "What Linux can learn from Solaris performance and vice-versa" (keynote), Brendan Gregg, SCaLE12x, Los Angeles 2014
28. "Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs" (plenary), Brendan Gregg, Large Installation System Admin. (LISA/USENIX), Washington DC, 2013
29. "Open Source Systems Performance", Brendan Gregg, O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Portland 2013
30. "Stop the Guessing: Performance Methodologies for Production Systems", Brendan Gregg, Velocity, Santa Clara 2013
31. "Linux Performance Analysis and Tools", Brendan Gregg, Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE11x), Los Angeles 2013
32. "Performance Analysis Methodology", Brendan Gregg, Large Installation System Admin. (LISA/USENIX), San Diego 2012
33. "ZFS Performance Analysis and Tools", Brendan Gregg, zfsday, San Francisco 2012
34. "DTracing the Cloud", Brendan Gregg, illumosday, San Francisco 2012
35. "Real-time in the real world: DIRT in production", Bryan Cantrill, Brendan Gregg, Surge, Baltimore 2012
36. "The USE Method", Brendan Gregg, Fórum Internacional Software Livre 13 (FISL13), Porto Alegre 2012
37. "Visualizations", Brendan Gregg, dtrace.conf, San Francisco 2012
38. "Performance Analysis: new tools and concepts from the cloud", Brendan Gregg, SCaLE10x, Los Angeles 2012
39. "Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Cloud Analytics Platform", Dave Pacheco, Brendan Gregg, OSCON data, Portland 2011
40. "Breaking Down Query Latency With DTrace", Brendan Gregg, Percona Live, New York 2011
41. "Visualizations for Performance Analysis", Brendan Gregg, Large Installation System Admininistration (USENIX/LISA), San Jose 2010
42. "How To Build Better Applications With Oracle Solaris DTrace", Brendan Gregg, Jim Mauro, Oracle Open World (OOW), San Francisco 2010
43. "DTrace Crash Course", Brendan Gregg, Kernel Conference Australia (KCA), Brisbane 2009
44. "Kernel Engineering", Brendan Gregg, Kernel Conference Australia (KCA), Brisbane 2009

Prior tutorials/workshops:

1. "Linux Performance Analysis Using Perf and BPF", Brendan Gregg, Sasha Goldshtein. USENIX/LISA, Boston 2016
2. "Linux Performance Tools", Brendan Gregg, O'Reilly Velocity, Santa Clara 2015
3. "Metrics Workshop", Brendan Gregg, Narayan Desai, Kent Skaar, Theo Schlossnagle, Caskey Dickson. Large Installation System Admin (LISA/USENIX), Washington DC 2013
4. Not listed here are instructor led training classes I've developed and delivered, which ranged from 3 to 10 days in length.