Brian Trammell is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google in Zürich, Switzerland, where he works on the management and measurement of datacenter reconfiguration and the production machine lifecycle. His interest in the Internet dates to 1993, when he first came online and decided he wanted to be part of making it better for everyone — a conviction that led him first to a sysadmin role at Georgia Tech, and then to network security measurement work at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, launching a career spanning Internet measurement, protocol engineering, and standards development.
Brian has been active in the IETF since 2004 and served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 2014 to 2020. His standards and research work has centered on the transport layer and on the tension between protocol evolution, network manageability, and user privacy. He currently co-chairs the IETF's SCONE working group, which addresses transport-layer encryption and network observability, and the IRTF's Path Aware Networking Research Group. Prior roles in the Internet engineering ecosystem include chairing the IP Performance Measurement working group in the IETF and the RIPE Measurement, Analysis, and Tools working group.
Before joining Google, he spent more than a decade as a researcher at ETH Zürich, focused on Internet performance measurement and the deployability and evolvability of Internet protocols. His extensive publications (full list at https://trammell.ch/publication) across operations, management, and transport include RFCs 9308 and 9312, the applicability and manageability guides for QUIC; RFCs 9621 and 9622 on the Transport Services architecture, a modern API for the transport layer; and RFC 8546 on the wire image of network protocols. Academic works include "Principles for Measurability in Protocol Design" (ACM CCR, with Mark Allman and Rob Beverly, which won the Best of CCR award in 2017) and "Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification" (PAM 2015), which contributed to restarting the deployment of this useful transport performance feature in the Internet.
In all of this work, and now as a member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees, Brian remains driven by the same conviction that first drew him online: that the Internet should work well, stay open, and keep evolving for everyone who depends on it.
