Ship It Conversations: Ang Chen on Project Vera, AI Cloud Emulation, and Safer Infrastructure Testing

Ship It Conversations: Ang Chen on Project Vera, AI Cloud Emulation, and Safer Infrastructure Testing

Author: Teller's Tech - DevOps, SRE and Cloud Podcast March 23, 2026 Duration: 24:23
Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News
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This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It: Conversations episode, I talk with Ang Chen from the University of Michigan about Project Vera, a cloud emulator built to help teams test infrastructure changes more safely before they touch real cloud.

We talk about why testing against real cloud APIs is slow, expensive, and risky, how Vera works under tools like Terraform and CloudFormation, what “high fidelity” actually means, and where a tool like this could fit in local dev and CI/CD.

The bigger theme is one I think matters a lot: if AI is going to play a real role in cloud operations, it probably needs a sandbox first, not direct access to production.

Note

This interview was recorded on February 13, 2026. Since then, Vera’s public project materials have expanded the framing a bit further around multi-cloud support and safe environments for agent learning, so keep that in mind while listening.

Highlights

• Why real cloud testing still creates cost, delay, and risk

• How Vera emulates cloud behavior at the API layer

• Where this could help with Terraform, CloudFormation, and CI/CD workflows

• Why “useful enough to catch real mistakes” may matter more than perfect emulation

• The limits, tradeoffs, and fidelity questions that still need to be solved

• Why safe training grounds may matter before AI agents touch real infrastructure

Ang’s links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ang-chen-8b877a17/

• University of Michigan profile: https://eecs.engin.umich.edu/people/chen-ang/

• Publications: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~chenang/pubs.html

Project Vera

• Project site: https://project-vera.github.io/

• GitHub: https://github.com/project-vera/vera

• The quest for AI Agents as DevOps: https://project-vera.github.io/blogs/cloudagent/cloudagent/

• No More Manual Mocks: https://project-vera.github.io/blogs/cloudemu/cloudemu/

Stuff mentioned

• A Case for Learned Cloud Emulators: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3718958.3754799

• Cloud Infrastructure Management in the Age of AI Agents: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3759441.3759443

• LocalStack: https://www.localstack.cloud/

Our links

More episodes + show notes + links: https://shipitweekly.fm

On Call Brief: https://oncallbrief.com


For anyone building or running modern systems, the sheer volume of news, tools, and incident reports can be overwhelming. Ship It Weekly cuts through that noise. This isn't a surface-level scan of headlines. Host Brian Teller digs into the latest significant outages, major software releases, and insightful post-mortems, focusing squarely on the practical implications for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering work. Each episode of the podcast breaks down a couple of key stories, providing the crucial context often missing from tech news. You'll hear analysis that translates events into actionable insights, answering the "so what?" for your own infrastructure and processes. The show also includes a quick rundown of tools or updates actually worth your attention, saving you hours of browsing. The tone is direct and informed, favoring depth over breadth. It’s designed for engineers and technical leaders who need a concise, reliable filter for the week's most relevant developments. Listen to this podcast for a focused recap that prioritizes what actually matters, delivered without fluff. You get the news, plus the necessary interpretation to understand how it might affect your systems, your team, and your on-call rotation. It's a weekly briefing that respects your time while aiming to make you more effective.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 37

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Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News
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