About Brian Teller
The voice behind Ship It Weekly.
- 56Episodes 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 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.
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
-
XTSR promo
Junior year at Towson University — college show on XTSR with a dormmate.
-
Quiznos commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
-
Carroll Manor Fire Company commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
-
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
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.org and lmgt.com — long-running “let me google that” pages that send a steady trickle of search traffic back to Ship It Weekly and this bio. Built once, maintained occasionally, useful indefinitely.
Recent episodes
AWS CloudFormation Express Mode, Spark 4.2 Vector Search, AI Speeds Coding but Not Delivery, Platform Governance Developers Won’t Hate, and Why Could Is Not the Same as Should
This episode of Ship It Weekly explores AWS CloudFormation Express mode, which accelerates deployment feedback but may mislead on resource readiness.
Ship It Conversations: Mat Ryer of Grafana Labs on AI Observability, Agents, Evals, and Operating AI in Production
In this episode, Mat Ryer from Grafana Labs discusses AI observability, focusing on the transition from demos to production systems. He explores the challenges of measuring AI's effectiveness, the importance of telemetry, and the need for trust in AI outputs.
GitHub API Enumeration, Grok Build CLI Data Exposure, AWS Security Hub Network Scanning, AI-Powered Patch Pressure, and Why Visibility Is Not Ownership
This episode of Ship It Weekly explores GitHub API enumeration, data exposure from AI tools, and AWS Security Hub's new features.
Listen wherever you get podcasts
Rep the show — Shop SIW merch.
Never miss an episode
New episodes weekly. Real conversations and news for engineers running production systems.
Find Ship It Weekly on your platform →Work with me
Be a Guest
Want to share your DevOps journey on Ship It Weekly? We're looking for passionate engineers to interview!
Apply to be a Guest →Become a Sponsor
Reach thousands of DevOps, Platform, and Cloud Engineering professionals. Partner with Ship It Weekly!
Talk Sponsorship →Connect with Teller's Tech
Follow the show on the platforms where the conversation actually happens.
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.
-
Re: How do you keep track of what's actually running in your cloud environment?
We already have FinOps, but honestly the bigger issue is still ownership and hygiene.
View thread on Reddit →
Every resource should have a clear owner, app, env, and reason it exists. If that info isn’t in tags or labels, it turns into a scavenger hunt later.
We also try to keep everything in Terraform and regularly compare what’s actually running against what’s defined in code. That helps catch old test envs, random one-off resources, and stuff nobody remembers creating.
For non-prod, expiration... -
Re: Terraform beginner: How do companies structure and manage Terraform?
There isn’t really one standard “enterprise” Terraform structure. It depends heavily on the company, team size, number of accounts and regions, compliance requirements, and how teams divide ownership.
View thread on Reddit →
A common pattern is to separate reusable modules from the live infrastructure code, then organize the live code by environment, account, and often region.
live/ dev/ us-east-1/ us-west-2/ stage/ us-east-1/ prod/ us-east-1/ us-west-2/
Modules might live in the same repo, sepa... -
Re: Macbook suggestion
I’d definitely avoid the 2019 Intel MacBook. Intel Macs are being phased out, macOS support is getting limited, and a lot of app developers are no longer creating Intel binaries. It’s not a great purchase if you want the machine to last another three years.
View thread on Reddit →
For DevOps work, I’d prioritize RAM over the i9 badge. Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, an IDE, and a browser can eat through 16GB pretty quickly. I’d look for an Apple Silicon Mac with at least 24GB, ideally 32GB, and... -
Re: Regrets leaving previous DevOps role as I am not enjoying the new company
Oof… A month is still pretty early, but the turnover, constant meetings, weak manager, and being expected to move fast while security blocks everything are all legit red flags.
View thread on Reddit →
Some of the AWS account/security stuff may get easier once you understand the setup better. The people and management problems usually don’t.
I’d give it a little more time, but I’d also start quietly looking. No need to run back to the old company, but I wouldn’t force yourself to stay just be... -
Re: AWS budget question
Nope, AWS Budgets are just alerts. AWS won’t automatically shut things down or stop charging once you hit $10.
View thread on Reddit →
Check Billing or Cost Explorer to see what’s running, then stop or delete it if you don’t want the bill to keep growing. There are some Budget Actions, but it’s not really a hard account-wide spending cap. -
Re: Rejected for being to "overqualified"
“Overqualified” usually means they’re worried you’ll get bored, want more money, leave quickly, or end up challenging the lead’s role.
View thread on Reddit →
It doesn’t necessarily mean the interview was fake. They may have liked you, then realized the role was more execution-focused than your background suggested.
I’d take it as a fit issue, not a failure. For future interviews, be really direct that you’re intentionally looking for a hands-on IC role and give examples of the technic... -
Re: Switching from cluster to SDLC automation, can I move back later?
IMO, I’d take it. You’re still doing platform work, just a layer higher.
View thread on Reddit →
CI/CD, Terraform workflows, policy checks, and running internal tooling on k8s all transfer back pretty well. Keep contributing upstream and stay a little hands-on with ClusterAPI/Crossplane, and moving back in a year or two shouldn’t be a problem.
For a 45% raise, that feels like a really easy call personally. -
Re: AWS Pricing Calculator
AWS’s pricing calculator has always been awful IMO. I usually end up using tools like https://instances.vantage.sh/ instead.
View thread on Reddit →
The hardest thing to estimate, and probably the most overlooked, is data transfer. Not really ingress, since that’s usually free, but internet egress, inter-AZ traffic, inter-region traffic, and NAT Gateway processing.
I’d be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to explain that copying EBS snapshots across regions costs money, movi...