Will Shackleton, Meta (Facebook)
Heavily integrated products like social networks are composed of many interconnected products and features. Over time, new features are built and deployed, and eventually their usage can drop to a point where some of these features need to be turned off and removed. Meta is establishing a set of best practices and processes for deprecating products to ensure that these operations are conducted safely and rigorously.
This talk will address how Meta handles “Product Deprecation”, the process of turning off an interconnected feature and deleting its code and user data safely and automatically. Topics we will discuss include: how we automate removal of dead data, why we need automated dead code removal as well, and how we have provided engineers with tooling to understand how code and data are being used to allow them to make decisions that unblock these automated removal systems.
Will Shackleton, Meta
Will Shackleton is a Software Engineer on the Privacy Infrastructure Team at Meta in London. He has spent the past few years building automation to remove code and data, as well as building tooling to help engineers remove products safely and effectively. Will also maintains Facebook’s Tor Onion Service. In his free time he plays baritone saxophone in a jazz band in London.
author = {Will Shackleton},
title = {Automating Product Deprecation},
year = {2022},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}