Shopify - What Is a Merge Queue?

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In the very beginning, our target for this was the Shopify monolith. But when we built out the solution for it, we wanted it to be generalized so that we had the option of turning it on for any repository at Shopify. The second part of that's really valuable is to make sure that people don't just break master on a small repo and never notice it. So we kind of like try to keep it open to both scenarios.

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.

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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

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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