Ken (Xu Chu) Lin

At Riot Games, we found that embracing serverless compute—rather than limiting it—allowed us to scale more effectively while improving performance, governance and user experience. In this session, we’ll share Riot’s shift from a cost-first mindset to an enablement-driven approach using Databricks SQL Serverless, with Unity Catalog as a key enabler. Consistent governance, lineage and usage visibility gave us the confidence to adopt serverless while maintaining transparency and accountability. We’ll explore how serverless SQL warehouses support diverse analytics and reporting needs through strong performance, simplified user experiences and elastic, on-demand cost efficiency. We’ll also discuss how serverless compute streamlined the data engineering lifecycle by reducing infrastructure management. Finally, we’ll cover Riot’s broader adoption of serverless for jobs and general workloads, the resulting operational and cost benefits, and how we manage costs in a serverless-first model.