Riot Games started its journey to building out SRE culture in 2020. The number 1 problem we had to solve first was a unified language across all teams and games about what availability was. In other words, we had to define "uptime". This talk will walk through how we developed our availability measurements by simple modifications to our incident management process and aligned leadership and engineers on being held accountable to availability using our most popular core value, Player Focus.
Maxfield Stewart has been shipping software and supporting production environments for over 25 years. Having worked in private consulting for fortune 500 companies like Goldman Sachs and Sprint, to over a decade and a half in the game industry. For the last 12 years Max has been helping Riot transition to continuous delivery, micro-services and changing culture around production availability, RCA's, post-mortems and observability.
author = {Maxfield Stewart},
title = {Measuring Availability the Player Focused Way: How Riot Games Changed Its Availability Culture},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}