Journey to 1000 models: Scaling Instagram’s recommendation system

What this post added

This post details Instagram's journey to scale its recommendation system to over 1000 ML models. It highlights the infrastructure challenges faced, including model discovery, safe release, and health monitoring. The post introduces solutions like a model registry for a single source of truth, automated model launch tooling to reduce time-to-launch from days to hours, and the operationalization of 'model stability' as a key metric for prediction accuracy. It also elaborates on the model registry's structure, including model types and criticality tiers, and its integration with Meta's configuration and monitoring tools.