About Brian Teller
The voice behind Ship It Weekly.
- 65Episodes published
- 25+Years in production
- 2Industry ambassadorships
The story behind Ship It Weekly
The short version, at a glance — the career, the toolkit, and the mission behind the show. The full story is just below.
Why Ship It Weekly exists
Brian started Ship It Weekly because most tech news does a decent job saying what happened, but not always why it matters to the people who actually have to run the systems afterward. A new cloud feature, a GitHub outage, a security advisory, an AI tooling release, a supply chain incident, a Kubernetes change, or a weird platform failure can all sound interesting in a headline. For the people on-call, managing infra, supporting developers, watching costs, and trying not to break production on a Friday, the real question is usually simpler: What does this mean for my team? That is the lens Brian brings to every episode.
Brian has spent years working in real production environments across cloud, infrastructure, automation, and reliability. Day-to-day work has covered Terraform and Terragrunt, AWS, Kubernetes, EKS, Kafka, CI/CD, GitHub, incident response, infrastructure guardrails, cost management, platform patterns, and the messy operational details that rarely show up in clean conference demos. Brian has worked as both a hands-on engineer and a technical mentor, helping teams make better decisions around infrastructure design, reliability, security, and delivery.
Ship It Weekly is built for the engineers, SREs, platform teams, DevOps folks, cloud engineers, technical leaders, and curious practitioners who want more than a headline recap. The show filters the noise down to the stories that matter for infrastructure, reliability, security, cost, engineering workflows, and production operations. Some weeks that means a major outage. Some weeks it means digging into GitHub Actions, AI agents, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, supply chain risk, or why a "small" tooling change can become a very big production problem.
Brian's style is practical, opinionated, and grounded in the reality of doing the work—not trying to sound like an analyst reading market notes. The focus is tradeoffs, failure modes, operational risk, team impact, and the "okay, what should we actually do with this?" part that often gets skipped.
That usually means asking questions like: Does this change how we build pipelines? Does this affect our blast radius? Should we be tightening permissions? Is this a real platform shift, or just vendor noise? What would I want my team to know before this becomes our incident?
Outside Ship It Weekly, Brian also hosts Kube Signals, a KubeFM series that picks up where conference keynotes leave off — turning platform trends into direct conversations with the speakers shaping them. He creates DevOps and cloud engineering content through Teller's Tech, with a focus on practical education instead of lab-only demos. The goal is to help engineers connect concepts to the kind of decisions they actually face in production: how to structure Terraform, how to think about reliability, how to avoid fragile automation, how to use AI without outsourcing judgment, and how to build systems that teams can safely operate over time.
At its core, Brian's work is about making infrastructure and operations conversations more useful. Less hype. Less vague "best practices." More context, more judgment, and more respect for the people carrying the pager.
Track record: production systems, leadership, and communication
Production infrastructure
Brian has co-led large-scale AWS → GCP migrations and owned Kafka platform engineering through vendor transitions (Confluent Cloud → MSK → Confluent Cloud with private networking), including Schema Registry and MirrorMaker2 / Replicator during cutover windows. He has supported public-company readiness from an infrastructure and platform angle, run SOC2 evidence programs across multiple audit cycles, and helped prepare teams for SOX expectations. Earlier in his career he operated AWS at depth and contributed heavily to PCI and SOC2 programs in HIPAA-certified environments, and he has led disaster recovery work with explicit RTO/RPO targets. As CTO of a digital-signage company, he led a zero-downtime migration to the cloud.
Leadership under pressure
Brian has operated as CTO and engineering manager, leading technical programs where clarity and accountability matter as much as architecture. Earlier leadership experience included running high-volume restaurant operations with teams up to ~60. Different domain, same lessons in shift orchestration, standards under stress, and customer-visible incidents when something breaks in front of the customer.
Early technical roots
Brian's first paid work in tech came during high school at fred.net (later xecu.net), a Frederick-area dial-up ISP doing front-line support, Unix administration, colo, and customer website hosting. In high school he also managed Unix mail servers and was president of the web club. He has been doing production-minded tech work since before DevOps was a job title.
Broadcast and communication
Brian came up through radio: a college show on XTSR at Towson University with a dormmate; intern to associate morning show producer at a major Washington, DC station (then Z104 / WWVZ–WWZZ); hosted evening (7–11pm) and Sunday mornings on Key 103.1 in Frederick, Maryland; and spent years as a mobile DJ for schools, weddings, and events. Live timing, reading a room, and staying composed when things break on air. Photos and audio from that era are below in On air & behind the mic.
Advising and teaching
Brian serves as an Industry Advisor at Cornell Tech, mentoring a multidisciplinary team of master's students through Studio as they research, design, test, and build solutions to real-world problems. The guidance is the same judgment this show is about: technical feasibility, engineering tradeoffs, product strategy, reliability, scalability, and what it actually takes to get an idea into production.
Outside work
Brian coaches youth football. Married, four kids. Fundamentals, repetition, and calm communication carry the same whether you are on a sideline, in a war room, or at the dinner table.
On air & behind the mic
Before infrastructure leadership and podcast hosting, Brian came up through college radio, major-market production in Washington, DC, and Frederick’s Key 103.1 — plus years as a mobile DJ. The photos and audio clips below are archive samples from that era (roughly 15–20 years ago). For how he sounds today on DevOps and platform topics, listen to Ship It Weekly.
Audio samples
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XTSR promo
Junior year at Towson University — college show on XTSR with a dormmate.
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Quiznos commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
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Carroll Manor Fire Company commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
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Pentagon area report (September 13, 2001)
Z104 (Washington, DC) — news intern coverage after 9/11, including a bomb-threat situation on 9/13/2001.
What I cover on Ship It Weekly
- DevOps
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Platform Engineering
- AI in Operations
- Cloud Engineering
- CI/CD
- Observability
- Incident Response
- Kubernetes
- Infrastructure as Code
- Production Engineering
Also hosts
Kube Signals on KubeFM — conversations that start where the keynote ends, following up with the speakers behind the trends platform teams have to operationalize next. First episode: Why Kubernetes Needs to Learn GPUs, with Saiyam Pathak.
Available for talks & engagements
Brian also speaks at conferences, internal engineering all-hands, leadership offsites, and on podcasts — same operator-focused lens, in person.
Currently writing
Confidently Wrong — a practical book for DevOps, SRE, platform, and infrastructure engineers on using AI safely across Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD, agentic workflows, and operational decisions. Same operator lens you hear on the show, in long form.
Building in the labs
Teller's Tech Labs is where I build practical tools and training systems for DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, and AI-era operational judgment. Flagship: Code Duck, an AI-driven incident simulator that helps engineers practice production judgment without breaking production. Currently in early access.
Also runs
lmgt.com — the long-running “let me google that” page that sends a steady trickle of search traffic back to Ship It Weekly and this bio. Built once, maintained occasionally, useful indefinitely.
lmgt.org — The LMGT Awards (“Let Me Give Thanks”): free, vendor-neutral awards for knowledge given away in production engineering. Produced here; governed with a published conflict policy.
Recent episodes
AWS GWLB TCP Reset, Azure DevOps Live Migrations to GitHub, GitHub Runner Enforcement, Docker Root Risk, Lambda IAM Updates, PostgreSQL Upgrade Traps, SonicWall Zero-Days & Better Incident Reviews
This episode of Ship It Weekly discusses AWS Gateway Load Balancer's new TCP Reset feature, enhancing recovery from network failures. It also covers Azure DevOps' migration tools to GitHub, GitHub's enforcement of self-hosted runners, and Docker security risks.
Cloudflare Saves 100TB of RAM, AI Drives Server Prices Up, AWS Adds a Fourth London AZ, Route 53 DNS Self-Service, AKS eBPF Routing, Go 1.27, and the Danger of Hidden Infrastructure Assumptions
In this episode, Ship It Weekly discusses Cloudflare's 100TB RAM savings through low-level cache optimizations and the implications of AI-driven price hikes in memory. AWS adds a fourth London Availability Zone, revealing hidden infrastructure assumptions.
Ship It Conversations: Justin Garrison of Sidero Labs on Kubernetes, Platform Engineering, AI, Golden Paths, and Knowing What to Say No To
In this episode, Justin Garrison from Sidero Labs discusses Kubernetes, platform engineering, and the importance of knowing what to say no to.
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Practitioner conversations
Where Brian shows up in practitioner threads: recent Reddit replies from /u/tellerstech across the engineering subreddits. Comments only — episode posts and self-promotion threads are filtered out.
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Re: How can I become a Cloud Security Engineer from complete beginner to expert who can eventually guide others?
I’d focus less on “cloud security” as one big thing and more on the fundamentals: Linux, networking, IAM, one cloud, Terraform, containers, logging, security basics.
View thread on Reddit →
Build labs, break things, fix them, and document what you learned. Certs can help with structure, but hands-on experience is what actually gets you job ready. -
Re: Does anyone else feel like AI is filtering out the code monkey?
I’ve been coding since the mid 90s, starting with BASIC in middle school. AI is a great tool and it’s absolutely changing engineering, but it hasn’t killed the passion for me at all.
View thread on Reddit →
If AI taking over some of the typing makes you lose that passion, maybe the passion was more about writing code than solving problems in the first place. -
Re: "It's not an entry-level job"
I don’t think “DevOps isn’t entry level” is gatekeeping. It’s just that the job assumes a pretty broad base across Linux, networking, cloud, code, CI/CD, etc.
View thread on Reddit →
That doesn’t mean you need 5 years as a full-stack dev first though. Junior infra/cloud roles, support, labs, homelabs, and real projects can all be valid paths in.
I’d just be careful treating DevOps as the “stable” escape hatch from software. Infra gets laid off too. Pursue it because you actually like... -
Re: Need Guidance for DevOps Career in 2026
You don’t need to become a full-stack developer first... you just need enough programming knowledge to read code, work with APIs, automate tasks, and debug applications when they break
View thread on Reddit →
I’d learn in this order:
Linux/networking -> Git -> Bash/Python -> APIs/databases -> Docker -> CI/CD -> cloud -> Terraform -> monitoring -> Kubernetes
Skip PHP/Laravel unless a specific job requires it, and don’t rush into Kubernetes
Most importantly, build one end-to-end project: containeriz... -
Re: New Job as AWS Infrastructure Engineer: Questions for the Pros
A lot of this is way less “AWS wizard” than it looks from the outside.
View thread on Reddit →
I use CLI pretty regularly for querying, debugging, scripting, etc. I rarely make meaningful infra changes with it though. That should usually go through Terraform/CDK/GitOps. And no, I absolutely do not have all the commands memorized. --help, docs, shell history, Google/AI… all fair game.
Same with docs. Senior engineers read docs constantly. Knowing syntax matters way less than understanding IAM, ne... -
Re: How AI could replace Devops?! What is the future?!
I wouldn’t worry much about an AI + DevOps certification.
View thread on Reddit →
Learn to actually use AI in your day-to-day work, but more importantly, understand the infrastructure underneath it. Terraform, Kubernetes, networking, distributed systems, how things fail, and how all those pieces interact.
AI is going to change DevOps, but IMO it makes that systems knowledge more important, not less. -
Re: How much am I expected to know before I apply to jobs?
You’re probably ready to start applying now.
View thread on Reddit →
I wouldn’t worry too much about memorizing Terraform syntax or every function. That stuff is easy to look up. What matters more is whether you understand the infrastructure itself, how to separate things logically, regions/accounts, providers, dependencies, state, and how to avoid creating weird chicken-and-egg problems.
Your Puppet experience counts too. You’ve already been doing infra/config as code, just with a different too... -
Re: If Infracost flags a large Terraform cost increase, what governs the approval decision?
Infracost should be a signal, not the decision maker IMO.
View thread on Reddit →
Usually the service/budget owner should approve the spend, not platform. Platform can enforce the workflow, but we probably shouldnt decide if the business is okay with another £8k/month.
I’d keep it simple…
small increase = normal PR review bigger increase = service owner approval + reason large increase = FinOps/budget owner approval
And yeah, record the reason in the PR/ticket. Approval doesnt mean the new baseline...
