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

Episode notes

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.

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