Engineering Enablement
Engineering Enablement Podcast
How Instagram Reels manages reliability | Jack Li (Instagram, Shopify)
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How Instagram Reels manages reliability | Jack Li (Instagram, Shopify)

Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.


Discussion points:

  • (1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability 

  • (3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization

  • (4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on

  • (4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify 

  • (8:32) The essence of DevOps

  • (10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams

  • (13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality

  • (15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems 

  • (18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process

  • (19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process

  • (28:10) How their incident review process works

  • (31:55) The roles involved in an incident review 

  • (33:40) The value of having incident reviews

  • (35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews 

  • (38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals

  • (40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on 

  • (43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify

  • (51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts

  • (52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue



Mentions and links:
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
Jack’s article from his time on Shopify about their Merge Queue
Jack’s talk on Shopify’s Merge Queue at GitHub Universe 2019

Discussion about this podcast