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Fauna Service Winding Down
- da02 2y agoWere their any options or competitors that came close to FaunaDB's abilities?
- atombender 2y agoGoogle Spanner, PlanetScale, CockroachDB, and TiDB are all in the same space.
- RadiozRadioz 2y agoAdded to my list of troubles & worries I avoided because I didn't rely on a random external company for critical infrastructure.
- biker142541 2y agoNot super familiar with Fauna as a company... not sure "random" applies, but I generally think the same way. If a provider can offer something that adds real value over alternatives, though, it's not a bad decision to go external. However, never rely on an external provider if there's not a low-risk offramp plan. Can I export all of my data and easily migrate, worst case scenario? Are there open source options using the same or similar formats/workflows/etc? Is the format itself proprietary or lock me in otherwise? Those sorts of questions need to be figured out fully before jumping aboard.
- surister 2y agoIf you work in IT, you most likely rely on 'random' external companies and random external OSS contributors to be honest.
- k__ 2y agoI had the impression FaunaDB was quite hyped some years ago. What happened?
- arccy 2y agounless you have a really strong unique selling point, it's hard to sell a DB that's only available as a service and not runnable locally?
- carlos-menezes 2y agoMy take: the industry is so set on SQL as as standard that FQL made Fauna a hard sell for production applications. Also, the pricing was quite steep.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoEven mongo only got a lot of people excited because they had hot girls on the stalls in the conferences. That i think was a master stroke in marketing to nerds. of course later on they improved the product as well, but initially it was a buggy mess and should not have survived the first few years.
- xp84 2y agoThe one constant in my career has been mongoDB -- specifically, projects to replace it with a relational database after a deployment had failed to deliver any of the expected benefits, and introduced unforeseen downsides that had become untenable. Mongo has literally never come up in any context for me where it wasn't either already, or eventually, slated for retirement. I absolutely don't doubt a document store including mongo is an ideal solution for certain specific applications. I just haven't come across one yet personally. For me personally, I would use Postgres for most things and JSONB columns for document-like things until I found a reason to change.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- film42 2y agoWow! I was looking at Fauna for a new project just yesterday. The tech looks good but a custom query language put me off pretty fast. Is this a real language or just an ORM syntax? Can I push code into the DB, or is it like the HCL of SQL? Even so, I hope it takes on a new life as an open source project and finds success. Looking forward to reading the code.
- reynaldi 2y agoSo sad, I was looking at Fauna for a MongoDB alternative after they removed their serverless tier. But still I'm glad I didn't go with Fauna, especially after knowing they are shutting down.
- warthog 2y agoThe announcement is quite short and does not really explain why they are shutting down other than it being "capital intensive" Anyone know more?
- gigatree 2y agoConsidering they only have “hundreds” of paid users despite how much money they’ve likely burned through, I’m guessing they just couldn’t raise enough additional capital to keep the lights on.
- readdit 2y agoI think it's interesting that they note they have hundreds of customers but their home page says it's trusted by thousands of companies. Are all these companies on a free tier?
- hifix 2y agoI would imagine it's the usual SaaS marketing embellishment, e.g. one Google employee used the software on a trial at some point === "Trusted by Google"
- senorrib 2y agoIt’s pretty clear they ran out of runway.
- killerteddybear 2y agoFirst Fauna graduates from Hololive, and now she graduates from being a company. Rip.
- wadenick 2y agoThis is a very tough announcement for any customers relying on the Fauna service. The announcement itself hides the all key details, clicking into the FAQ reveals the date is not several months away but in fact 2 months 11 days away, and there is no FaunaDB open source release to start saving your own ass today. > we have made the hard decision to sunset the Fauna service over the next several months. clicks into the FAQ vs > Fauna service will be ending on May 30, 2025.
- anonzzzies 2y agooh wow that is very fast. I would really hope the open source version appears on github tomorrow then to dive in and migrate.
- wadenick 2y agoyes, or even just be able to stand up your own for a longer period while you figure out how to migrate to something else altogether.
- tomhallett 2y agoThe word choice of “several” feels a bit mis-leading. Reminds me of the Big Bang Theory quote: That is not a lot of weeks. In fact, that's the bare minimum to get to the plural "weeks".
- wadenick 2y ago...agree, even spending time singing on anything else in the first paragraph instead of breaking the bad news WITH THE DATE first feels rather off.
- anonzzzies 2y agoSo the core tech will be open source? That is all to run it or? As that would be pretty sweet really next to this sad news. I hope something good will come from it.
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoYeah. It is surprising this announcement does not come with link to Github. Hopefully they can follow through - the challenge in such situation might be relying on some proprietary technology for your SaaS which you can't open source.
- picardo 2y agoSomeone told me FaunaDB the company had a strict "no one gets fired" policy. However, they also hired a few toxic people, and that created a dilemma for some folks because it was either leave or learn to tolerate toxicity.
- jaapz 2y agoBlack and white policies like this are so dumb Don't fire employees immediately when they make mistakes, sure. But not firing them at all, even if they are obviously bad for your company? That's just bad management
- xp84 2y agoDefinitely one of the most unpleasant jobs* of a manager is having to hold people accountable for their actions in this way, but yeah. Refusing to address it is the coward's move, and it'll destroy your culture. * Second only to having to field questions about and spin upper management decisions that you also disagree with.
- Workaccount2 2y agoGenerally just avoid absolutes as much as possible in your life. In most cases it will benefit you.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoShutting down the whole business is the loop hole leadership found to skirt around this policy.
- nine_k 2y agoIf they were making money hand over fist, they would likely just change the policy. Or at least if somebody would acquire them. Apparently their VC investors were not seeing the hockey stick growth, so they decided to cut the losses. Taking VC money is a more risky bet than other forms of investment. If your business is profitable, but small and is growing 5-7% a year, and no acquisition is sight, most likely it's going to be shut down.
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoThis highlights the challenge of smaller proprietary SaaS offerings - they can shut down abruptly leaving you in the bind. It is great to see Fauna making a commitment to Open Source the project, which will be great option to have for their customers I wish they would have started with Open Source project to begin with, perhaps future would be different
- Alifatisk 2y ago> they can shut down abruptly leaving you in the bind "We understand that this is going to be a disruptive change to many and are fully committed to working with you to help you migrate off the service over the next several months."
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoYes. We will work with you to help you, does not mean it is not going to be disruptive. Changing database technology is hard. Moving off from cloud to self serviced option is also hard.
- victorbjorklund 2y agoIt is 2 months to switch to a totally different database with a totally different query language. That is not easy even if you get some "help" from a company shutting down.
- Alifatisk 2y agoYeah I agree, 2 months is absurd.
- traceroute66 2y ago> This highlights the challenge of smaller proprietary SaaS offerings A large multinational like, say, Google would never do such a thing.... [1] Give me a break ! [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
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- dzonga 2y agolooks like a dope product. sad they're shutting down - which means people losing jobs. some of these things have to be open source from the get go & secure a cloud partnership. for simple dev's like me sticking to the old and trusted relational model seems you never lose. it's always there & you're not worried about a service provider going away
- 6h5h6h512 2y agoIt's a good idea to find out if the company you're working for is focused on growth or profit. If growth then run because it means the business model isn't profitable which means they will eventually reduce workforce and operations.
- nikita 2y agoOne of the services that can replace the fauna service is DocumentDB Postgres plugin (+proxy that is not open sourced yet, but will be shortly). It's available on Azure, but I can also see other Postgres Providers will start picking this up. https://github.com/microsoft/documentdb https://github.com/microsoft/documentdb
- adobrawy 2y agoThere is an open-source proxy for PostgreSQL with DocumentDB to implement the MongoDB interface: https://blog.ferretdb.io/ferretdb-v2-ga-open-source-mongodb-alternative-ready-for-production/ https://blog.ferretdb.io/ferretdb-v2-ga-open-source-mongodb-...
- farceSpherule 2y ago"Added to my list of troubles & worries I avoided because I didn't rely on a random external company for critical infrastructure." +1,000
- eigilsagafos 2y agoWe were Fauna users for several years and invested a lot of time working with it and around it. The time travel capability was one of the stand out features for us in addition to FQL which opened some interesting capabilities. That being said for various reasons we had to transition away from it and did so by creating a FQL compatible solution on top of Postgres. It is implemented in JavaScript/TypeScript and runs in Postgres through the plv8 extension. Is this something that would be interesting to other current users?
- whatever3 2y agoSounds like it could be very useful to others. Make sure to post it to HN if you decide to publish the source
- anonzzzies 2y agoYou are licensing it or? We would, especially after this type of thing, again, be looking for something open.
- eigilsagafos 2y agoWould be open source for sure
- wadenick 2y agoI really think any help the community could offer - and also receive - would be welcome news for those still on Fauna service right now. Especially open source. People could move quickly – with multiple options – to help themselves, which after all is the only thing Fauna the co is able to offer anyway. Like the other commenter said, if you do release it open source please post on Hacker News and maybe Reddit and we'll all try to help boost it.
- eigilsagafos 2y agoUpdate: I created a placeholder repo on Github with some more information on what is currently supported. Please engage if this could help anyone https://github.com/eigilsagafos/fauna-postgres/issues/1 https://github.com/eigilsagafos/fauna-postgres/issues/1
- jjordan 2y agoWe left when their pricing shot up to $500/mo for what we thought were some basic features. That and they fought us tooth and nail to be able to make local backups of OUR data, I say good riddance.
- pier25 2y agoI was a Fauna customer and also worked with them providing technical writing for their blog and docs. At one point I was even contacted by a publisher to write a book about Fauna. I don't know what happened internally but when they accepted VC money and put a new CEO it all started to go down, fast. They probably started focusing on selling to corps instead of devs which seemed illogical IMO. Corps bring more money but at the time it was clear to me that Fauna would never be able to compete in with on-prem SQL-heavy kind of environments. Fauna made sense as a secondary database for certain use cases that needed to be global... but who would use a high risk database with no fallback as their main database? Maybe small projects but definitely not big companies/products. A decade ago it seemed that edge computing, serverless, and distributed data was the future. Fauna made a lot of sense in that vision. But in these years since, experimenting with edge stuff, I've learned that most data doesn't really need to be distributed. You don't need such a sophisticated solution to cache a subset of data for reads in a CDN or some KV. What I'm saying is that, probably, Cloudflare Workers KV and similar services killed Fauna.
- UltraSane 2y agoyou really should scale vertically until you can't anymore. a server with two 64 core epyc CPUs and 3TB of RAM and 24 NVMe flash SSDs is going to be able to handle 99% of companies SQL DB needs.
- rjbwork 2y agoAgree. The microservice "shared nothing" NoSQL-oriented approach has, IMO, shown itself to be a cargo-cult of FAANG practices that are just not worth the downsides in practice at that 99% of companies.
- UltraSane 2y agoIt does become necessary when you really do need the computing power of hundreds of servers but that is rare.
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- shermantanktop 2y agoI’m only comfortable with proprietary infrastructure if I can convince myself that 1) I could get off of it if I wanted to (e.g. can I get my data back out?) and 2) the near-term gains are going to offset the work associated with getting off of it. That is the exact opposite of the dynamic that VC funded infra companies aim for. They want you dependent and addicted, so you can be cited as part of their durable advantage/moat for their next round.
- strobe 2y agoI found Fauna very interesting from a technical perspective many years ago, but even then, the idea of a fully proprietary cloud database with no reasonable migration options seemed pretty crazy at the time. I thought maybe they had some good source of very specific niche customers who fine with that, but it seems even if that was true it wasn't enough for a grow. Really hope that something useful will be open sourced as result.
- grounder 2y agoHopefully a new company will form to pick up the open source pieces and go from there. I wonder if Fauna tried to find a buyer - it seems like they have some valuable software but weren't able to make it work. Shutting down in 2.5 months is pretty aggressive. Good luck to the former customers. I was expecting the migration guide to recommend some other options. I don't know of other BaaS document databases like Fauna. I guess Mongo, CouchDB, Couchbase, and traditional Postgres would be the first open source options to look for. DocumentDB for closed source but offered by a big cloud vendor (AWS). If you want to roll the dice again, then maybe SurrealDB or RavenDB.
- srhtftw 2y agoAlthough I'm not a fauna user, I like studying databases and query languages. I've followed them since Jepsen¹ reviewed FaunaDB 2.5.4 back in 2019. While their FQL looks useful, I can't imagine using a SaaS-only proprietary query language in this age for anything other than a research proof-of-concept to learn more about my problem before building a real product on an open platform. Curious that Bob Muglia (ex Snowflake) is on their board. I believe he's also on the board of Relational AI which is another SaaS with an interesting but proprietary query language. Snowflake is a huge success in spite of being proprietary because its SQL isn't hard to learn or use, but I can't say the same about rAI. Makes me wonder how they will turn out. ¹ https://jepsen.io/analyses/faunadb-2.5.4 https://jepsen.io/analyses/faunadb-2.5.4
- dangoodmanUT 2y agoI've expected this to happen, but tbh i didn't expect it to take this long. They went for a fundamentally "lock in to a startup DB that's fully proprietary so you're screwed if we go under" which is now happening. Open source _helps a bit_, but it doesn't change that customers now have to self-manage a database. I'm guessing most of their customers are not particularly savvy at DB self-hosting.
- spatialsupport 2y agoSuch a bummer logging into the fauna dashboard this morning.. I built a lot of my product's logic around fauna and it's tied in really deeply throughout my software. Really bummed to have to rip it all out after all the work done getting it properly integrated in the first place.