Stability upgrade and planned migration for NA servers

Hi NA players!

I’m Riot Natural20, a Senior Release Manager at Riot Games, and I’m a part of the team that’s rebuilding League’s server infrastructure and migrating players to this new environment. Earlier this year, our team performed the EUW migration to the Amsterdam datacenter, and now we’re ready to tackle NA. While this is a slightly different type of migration, we’re taking learnings from Amsterdam to deliver on the core advantages of the EUW migration: more stable connectivity, minimized downtimes, and improved service.

So, why are we doing this? Over the evolution of League’s growth, we’ve renovated the existing environment quite a bit. To accommodate this expansion, improve security, and upgrade our hardware and software, we’re starting from a blank slate and building everything from the ground up. This means an all-new, state of the art network and server infrastructure for NA!

Our number one goal with this migration is increasing server stability: allowing you to play the game whenever you want and with minimal service interruption. This new environment will also give us more tools to prevent malicious attacks, which means even more stability.

This migration is just one part of our commitment to get you the service you deserve, starting with increased stability. Latency is definitely on our radar, though ping isn’t what we should address right now. Instead, we’re tackling stability first because ping is sort of a moot point without a stable game foundation—low ping doesn’t really help if you’re experiencing disconnects or can’t even log in.

We’re in the last phases of our build out and migration testing period, so we’re tentatively scheduling the migration for early November. We’ll post another announcement on Boards about two weeks before migration day, and we’ll make a final announcement the day before migration.

As a heads up, during the migration, you won’t be able to log into the client or play League for about 12 hours. Don’t worry—we’re planning maintenance for the middle of the night, like we do for patch releases, so we’ll minimize the impact of our downtime. For NA, game time is typically at its lowest between 2:00-3:00am PST, which means we’d start migrating around 12:01am PST. We’ll give you a more specific date and time in our final announcement.

I’m sure you guys have a ton of questions. Fire away and I’ll do my best. I can answer most stuff, though I can’t divulge certain tech details and specs because that could jeopardize the stability we’re aiming for with this new environment.

—Riot Natural20