Fauna Service Winding Down
fauna.com
fauna.com
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.
Love of money is the root of all evil.
Stackoverflow is famously powered by a cluster of three vertically scaled database servers.
Like you say, deploy read replicas or automate regular backups (with regularly tested restore automation), whatever you need to meet your RTO and RPOs.
You need to be able to ignore any ignorant sales/marketing/growth management that try to tell you "we can't afford any downtime at all!!!" and have enough internal political power on the tech side. Tech leadership should be able to document the costs of each extra nine of uptime to senior management and have them acknowledge that occasional second or perhaps even minutes of downtime during failover is acceptable.
By the time you start approaching the limits of your server with two 64 core epyc CPUs and 3TB of RAM and 24 NVMe flash SSDs - hopefully you no longer need to take advice from randoms on HN because you should by then have 100+ database and network engineers working follow the sun shifts with some _really_ smart and deeply experienced dedicated database leadership managing them.
Or, you need to get someone on board to teach all your junior devs or "vibe coders" about database indexes and how to construct queries that don't do multiple fulltable scans just to render some user profile widget on every page load... "But it wrks fine on my laptop!!!" (with a whole 7 user accounts and 47 rows in the user_activity table...)
The "scalability by default" mindset has wasted billions of hours of productivity globally, yet we're still doing it.
But the selling point of Fauna was primarily the data distribution, no? Like GC Spanner but without having to sell and arm and a leg.
(Spanner is more affordable now but it used to cost hundreds per month to get started)
> 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.
That is not a lot of weeks. In fact, that's the bare minimum to get to the plural "weeks".
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.
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
* Second only to having to field questions about and spin upper management decisions that you also disagree with.
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.
But if you take the rocket fuel of VC financing, you either accelerate so fast as to reach the orbit, or you crash back to earth. There's no glider option then.
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.
Even so, I hope it takes on a new life as an open source project and finds success. Looking forward to reading the code.
Really hope that something useful will be open sourced as result.
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.
I hope something good will come from it.
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.
Anyone know more?
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
"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."
Changing database technology is hard. Moving off from cloud to self serviced option is also hard.
A large multinational like, say, Google would never do such a thing.... [1]
Give me a break !
If AWS would chose to kill MySQL RDS... there are number of other solutions for MySQL DBaaS... even on AWS cloud.
(If you think "Google Cloud IoT Core" or "Google Cloud Prediction API" count, then I'm afraid you've made the opposite point you were trying to make.)
No one fears AWS or Azure is going to shut down services they rely on (even if it happens in some rare cases).
If we give the benefit of the doubt to a quick internet search, e.g. AWS: S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit.
All closed to new business, closure pending for existing customers.
I'm sure if you read the small print, neither AWS or Azure make you any promises about the longevity of their services.
Infact, if you believe in the cloud mantra, then you should treat all cloud services as a commodity that can undergo substancial changes or removal at any time.
> The Fauna service will be ending on May 30, 2025
E.g. Microsoft shut down (is still shutting down) Classic Admin Roles for Azure subscriptions for close to 9 months now.also, closed for new business also means there's no reason to migrate away if you've never got onto it - and you can still use it if you're already on it.
2.5 months to migrate off a service is way to short, especially in a time where no support from the supplier (Fauna) can be expected as employees will leave to (if they can).
I don't think they went against that policy for the past 16 years. I've certainly had services running there non-stop, with little to no maintenance, for about a decade.
And SimpleDB has been deprecated for years. I don't know think there's a single service you could have picked to better highlight the point.
AWS does close services, from time to time, all companies do, but the services they choose and the way they do it instill confidence in customers. The way GCP does it instills fear
What happened?
same might apply to data: not your server, not your data.
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.
I've personally never had to shard anything in my professional career. Although IDK how painstaking the sharding would really be for most uses I can imagine besides like, social media. Facebook has to deal with everyone interacting with everyone. But the vast majority of situations most developers see isn't like that. You can run Salesforce purely sharding at the tenant level, since I only need to see my tenant's data.
Anyway I feel the need to be emphatic, I'm sure Mongo's benefits can be realized somewhere, just not in any small or medium sized company that doesn't need sharding, and does need a schema.
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
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.
+1,000
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.
https://www.jaxon.gg/ceres-fauna-graduation-announced-why-is...