Riot Games serves more than 100 million players worldwide. Its debut title, League of Legends, is one of the most-played PC games in the world and a key driver in the rise of esports. Beyond League, Riot enjoys rising demand for a growing set of games, such as VALORANT and Teamfight Tactics. The infrastructure this growth was built on leveraged the right tools at the time, but to be true to its player-focused mission, Riot knew it needed to level up to the cloud. This would take Riot on a journey that was nothing short of legendary.

Riot launched League of Legends back in 2009. Amazon debuted the first commercial cloud only three years before. Considering the cloud was such a new technology, it’s little surprise that Riot kept all its IT infrastructure in datacenters. “Let’s be honest,” said Riot’s head of global infrastructure and operations, Brent Rich, onstage at AWS re:Invent 2023, “we didn’t trust that anyone else could meet our bar for making live games great.”

In Rich’s words, “That worked for about a decade.” By then, it was taking “forever” for Riot to get things done. This risked affecting player experience, and with aspirations to be the most player-focused game company in the world, Riot would not tolerate being encumbered by aging technology. “We knew that if over 100 million players worldwide didn’t see Riot investing in and loving our own game, they would leave, even if it is free to play,” said Rich. 

By that same time, leaders at Riot had grown more confident that the cloud was a viable option, and that AWS had the broad set of services that Riot needed. So Riot decided to go all in with the cloud, transitioning away from the work of managing datacenters to focus more on building amazing games and player experiences.

Through meticulous planning across teams from Riot, Slalom, AWS, and AWS Professional Services, Riot completed the journey to the cloud with finesse. Together, we retired or migrated nearly all of Riot’s infrastructure, including the workloads that power League of Legends. 

The overall migration program consisted of several different initiatives, including: 

• Decommissioning 16 datacenters across 10 cities that supported gameplay and in-game purchasing for millions of players worldwide 
• Exiting a datacenter in Las Vegas with more than 1,200 servers and 300 terabytes of data 
• Improving how Riot’s teams provision new, cloud-based IT resources through an automated deployment model 

Riot hit every target date for leaving its datacenters, thanks in large part to an automation runbook that Slalom created for Riot’s transition to the cloud. The runbook was the product of a comprehensive effort to understand, deconstruct, and document the intricacies of the engineering procedures for League of Legends. Riot’s teams successfully used the runbook to re-create on-premises environments on AWS efficiently, which helped them compress launch windows over the course of the migration. 

More important for players, Riot’s migration has led to latency improvements for many gamers around the world. With support from Slalom and AWS, Riot has carefully considered the global infrastructure of AWS and strategically selected locations for its servers based on which ones will provide players the lowest latency. For example, Riot was able to achieve latency improvements that were 36% to 53% better than expected in one region, translating to a smoother gaming experience for players. 

“This transition to AWS technology has not only uplifted the Riot player experience globally but also established a foundational environment for integrating cloud solutions into game development,” said Tracy Ruthkoski, a director at Slalom.

According to Rich, the entire migration would not have been such a triumph without the teamwork of Riot, Slalom, and AWS. In an AWS blog post about the work, Rich underscored the significance of strategic partnerships in navigating complex challenges: 

“There are some things that are very hard to do without a strategic partner. Working with AWS and our integration partner, Slalom, for example, we now have a shared automation runbook for League of Legends that is incredibly detailed. If we have to stand something up in a new region, we can now do that in a matter of weeks. Those partnerships are invaluable.”