Hi, my name is Aaron Torres and I’m an engineering manager for the Riot Developer Experience team. We accelerate how game teams across Riot develop, deploy, and operate their backend microservices at scale - globally. I’ve been at the company for a little over 3 years and I’ve been writing Go code that entire time. In this article, we’ll be specifically looking at how a few different teams use Go. I’ll be tagging in two technologists - Chad Wyszynski from RDX Operability and Justin O’Brien from VALORANT - to discuss how they use Go for their projects.

The Riot internship program helps technical players drive their professional growth by embedding them on tech teams and having them contribute to impactful, exciting technology projects. Last year we published an article by some of our interns, giving readers a glimpse at the projects technical interns get to work on. We’re doing a follow-up this year, but with additional sections to reflect our new games. 

There were so many interns excited to contribute to this article that this year we’ll be doing a 2-part series. Intern stories are sorted into categories - the first post (this one) includes all blurbs for League of Legends, TFT, & VALORANT, and the second post focuses on General Game Tech & Tooling/Infrastructure.

The Riot internship program exists to help players drive their professional and personal development. This is the second post in the 2020 intern series - be sure to check out the first post as well.

Welcome back to the Running Online Services series! This long-running series explores and documents how Riot Games develops, deploys, and operates its backend infrastructure. Since 24 months is an eternity in this space, we figured we would update you all on how things have worked out, new challenges we faced, and what we learned addressing them!

For the past 8 years, League has been using a patching system called RADS (Riot Application Distribution System) to deliver updates. RADS is a custom patching solution based on binary deltas that we built with League in mind. While RADS has served us well, we felt we had an opportunity to improve some key areas of the patching experience. We knew we could deliver updates much more quickly and more reliably by using a fundamentally different approach to patching, so we set out to build a brand new patcher based on content-defined chunking.

Hey folks! We’re going to take a trip back in time. The year is now 20xx, and we’ve decided that it’s finally time to send one of League of Legends’ most long standing, revered or reviled features (depending on who you ask) to the meme graveyard.

That’s right - it’s time to retire runes and masteries.

It’s been over two years since I first wrote an article discussing how we combined Docker containers and Jenkins to create ephemeral build environments for a lot of our backend software at Riot Games. Today the series is seven articles strong and you’ve rewarded us with feedback, conversation, technical insights, tips, and stories about how you too use containers to do all kinds of interesting things. In the world of technology, two years is a long time. The series, while still useful, is out of date. Many of the latest Docker doodads and gizmos are absent.

In the previous article in this series I discussed the ecosystem of supporting services that allow us to operate micro-services in production. If our micro-services are our carries and those tools are our supports, what about our junglers? That’s where our developer ecosystem for cluster management comes in.

Hey all, this is David Press and Doug Lardo, two engineers working on improving the data center networking that enables online services at Riot. This article is the third part in a series on exactly that topic, which begins with an overview from Jonathan of a platform we called rCluster.

Our names are Kyle Allan and Carl Quinn, and we work on the infrastructure team here at Riot. Welcome to the second blog post in our multi-part series describing in detail how we deploy and operate backend features around the globe. In this post, we are going to dive into the first core component of the deployment ecosystem: container scheduling.