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 The series, while still useful, is out of date.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.

My name is Jonathan McCaffrey and I work on the infrastructure team here at Riot. This is the first post in a series where we’ll go deep on how we deploy and operate backend features around the globe. Before we dive into the technical details, it’s important to understand how Rioters think about feature development. Player value is paramount at Riot, and development teams often work directly with the player community to inform features and improvements.

Over the past several months I’ve published six articles that discuss using Docker and Jenkins to containerize a build farm. Recently, I went on the road to tell the story at DockerCon 2016 and gathered a tremendous amount of amazing feedback. In fact, the best part of this whole experience has been the conversations we’re having with folks encountering similar challenges. In this short post, I’d like to accomplish two things: share the video of my DockerCon talk, and respond to requests we’ve received to consolidate my articles into a single place.

This is the in-depth tutorial for the discussion started here about creating a build farm using Jenkins with Docker containers as the build slaves. When we’re done, you should have a fully functional Jenkins environment that provisions build slaves dynamically running on your local environment and ready for you to productionize.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• Various approaches to running builds with Jenkins inside of Containers

• Which decisions we made as a team and why

• Lessons we learned while operating our platform

• Context for the in depth tutorial about how to create your own ephemeral build environments using Jenkins