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

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