Alation > Case Studies > Riot Games Enhances Data Management and Engineer Workflow with Alation

Riot Games Enhances Data Management and Engineer Workflow with Alation

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Cement
Mining

Use Cases

Building Automation & Control
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Riot Games is a gaming company best known for their game League of Legends, which has over 150 million registered users and hosts the most widely viewed and followed esports tournament globally. The company was founded in 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill and is currently led by CEO Nicolo Laurent. Riot Games is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and has over 2,500 employees, known as Rioters, in more than 20 offices around the globe. The company's debut title, League of Legends, is the most-played PC game in the world and a key driver of the explosive growth of esports.

The Challenge

Riot Games, the company behind the globally popular game League of Legends, was struggling to manage and derive value from the vast amounts of data generated by its over 150 million registered users. The company had a growing Databricks lakehouse on their AWS S3 cloud storage service, but finding valuable information within this data lake was proving to be a challenge. The analysts at Riot Games needed the right data to derive insights using their Tableau business intelligence platform, but the engineering teams were constantly bogged down with questions about the data. The engineers were repeatedly answering the same questions, which was taking up valuable time that could have been spent on more meaningful projects. The company needed a solution that would allow analysts to self-serve and self-educate, reducing the burden on the engineering teams.

The Solution

Riot Games turned to Alation, a data intelligence platform, to help both their analysts and engineers become smarter about data. The platform allows analysts to use keyword searches to discover the data they need and explore it in depth, down to the schema, table, and column level. They can then run queries and create reports in Tableau directly from Alation. Engineers, on the other hand, use Alation to catalog and curate metadata from the thousands of tables and datasets they create every day. This reduces the number of direct inquiries from analysts, freeing up engineers’ time for more meaningful projects. To further improve the workflow, Alation Professional Services created an event-based metadata extraction (MDE) API that updates the Alation catalog whenever engineers create or change a table in Databricks. This allows engineers to add their annotations to the newly created table within minutes, and move on with their work.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Alation has significantly improved the efficiency and workflow of both engineers and analysts at Riot Games. Engineers can now focus on creating and managing data pipelines, while analysts can concentrate on deriving insights from data, instead of spending time searching for data or asking engineers about it. The Alation MDE API has also improved the workflow of engineers by allowing them to add annotations to newly created tables within minutes. This has eliminated the need for engineers to wait for 12- to 24 hours to check that box. Furthermore, Riot Games is planning to integrate data-use policies directly into the catalog, which will provide just-in-time guidance on how to use data compliantly and help the company avoid regulatory risk.

Quantitative Benefit

Metadata extraction and curation that previously took 24 hours now takes under 5 minutes
Alation has become one of the first places data engineers and analysts look for information, indicating high adoption rates
Engineers' productivity has increased due to reduced direct inquiries from analysts