Today we’re joined by Vladimir Bychkovsky, Engineering Manager at Facebook, to discuss Spiral. Spiral is a system they’ve developed for self-tuning high-performance infrastructure services at scale, using real-time machine learning. In our conversation, we explore the ins and outs of Spiral, including how the system works, how it was developed, and how infrastructure teams at Facebook can use it to replace hand-tuned parameters set using heuristics with services that automatically optimize themselves in minutes rather than in weeks. We also discuss the challenges of implementing these kinds of systems, overcoming user skepticism, and achieving an appropriate level of explainability. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/talk/221.