[HN Gopher] Fauna Service Winding Down
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Fauna Service Winding Down
Author : jaredwiener
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-03-19 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fauna.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fauna.com)
| k__ wrote:
| I had the impression FaunaDB was quite hyped some years ago.
|
| What happened?
| arccy wrote:
| unless 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?
| vincnetas wrote:
| as a saying goes from crypto crowd: not your keys, not your
| coins.
|
| same might apply to data: not your server, not your data.
| pier25 wrote:
| They used to provide a Docker image for local dev but that
| was it AFAIK.
| carlos-menezes wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| Even 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Everyone earns the scars from understanding that all data
| has a schema. If you use pg, you mostly resolve the
| schema on write; if you use mongodb, you resolve it into
| a schema on read as well. The latter turns out to be very
| hard to make robust.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's webscale!
| computerfan494 wrote:
| The reason to change is scale. If your Postgres spend is
| in the six digits a month range, JSONB is probably very
| painful for you. It does not perform very well.
| Additionally, you've probably spent a good amount of
| engineering time painstakingly sharding your database at
| the application level and hoping you've done it
| correctly. MongoDB solves these problems out of the box,
| among others. I have run both of these above 1M a month
| in spend and I would certainly choose MongoDB for this
| over Postgres. If you plan on never spending a lot on
| your database, I do like Postgres a lot, still.
| alittletooraph2 wrote:
| i worked at MongoDB for nearly 10 years... when the heck
| did they have booth babes at conferences?
| meindnoch wrote:
| hyped != viable
| da02 wrote:
| Were their any options or competitors that came close to
| FaunaDB's abilities?
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Added to my list of troubles & worries I avoided because I didn't
| rely on a random external company for critical infrastructure.
| biker142541 wrote:
| Not 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.
| film42 wrote:
| Wow! 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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| The announcement is quite short and does not really explain why
| they are shutting down other than it being "capital intensive"
|
| Anyone know more?
| gigatree wrote:
| Considering 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It's pretty clear they ran out of runway.
| wadenick wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| oh wow that is very fast. I would really hope the open source
| version appears on github tomorrow then to dive in and migrate.
| wadenick wrote:
| yes, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Yeah. 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 wrote:
| Someone 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 wrote:
| Black 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 wrote:
| Definitely 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 wrote:
| Generally just avoid absolutes as much as possible in your
| life. In most cases it will benefit you.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Shutting down the whole business is the loop hole leadership
| found to skirt around this policy.
| nine_k wrote:
| If 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| Only growing 5-7% a year *after taking millions in
| investment.
| nine_k wrote:
| Exactly. It could have been a bootstrapped business
| possibly, maybe with traditional loans for business
| growth.
|
| 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.
| tysont wrote:
| I led the engineering team at Fauna and this is false - we had
| a performance culture and performance managed/exited people
| when they did not meet expectations. I've managed some
| outstanding teams/organizations at Microsoft, Amazon, and Riot
| Games and the team behind Fauna was world-class; on par with
| the best teams that I have seen or been a part of. There are
| plenty of reasons that the company didn't succeed, some in our
| control and some out of our control, but the caliber of people
| at the company and the company culture are not on that list.
| picardo wrote:
| This was about 7 years ago. Maybe things were different then?
| But yeah it did strike me as odd so that's why I didn't
| forget it.
| da02 wrote:
| Are there any interesting DBaaS that are on your radar this
| year?
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yes. 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Yeah I agree, 2 months is absurd.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 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/
| Illniyar wrote:
| Google is the exception that proves the rule. Companies are
| fearful of using GCP exactly because of their terrible
| reputation of unreliability (and lack of even basic support).
|
| No one fears AWS or Azure is going to shut down services they
| rely on (even if it happens in some rare cases).
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > AWS or Azure is going to shut down services they rely on
|
| 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.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Not knowing the facts for those specific services but I
| assume it's more than a 2 months period for migration:
|
| > 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).
| ncruces wrote:
| Google's GCP Discontinuation of Services policy requires
| 1 year advance notice for generally available services;
| this includes any significant backwards incompatible
| changes.
|
| 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.
| Illniyar wrote:
| No new customers is not shutting down services you rely
| on. It's the exact opposite. It's making sure things you
| rely on continue to work until you are ok leaving it.
|
| 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
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Yes. The keyword is "Proprietary" whenever it is offered by
| large company or small, Open Source solution you can chose to
| migrate to is what really offers you safety. This also tends
| to ensure multiple DBaaS vendors are available.
|
| If AWS would chose to kill MySQL RDS... there are number of
| other solutions for MySQL DBaaS... even on AWS cloud.
| sowbug wrote:
| Your argument would be more effective if you had linked to a
| source showing that Google had discontinued at least one GCP
| product. I count zero on that page.
|
| (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.)
| biker142541 wrote:
| I honestly don't understand the path of creating a fully
| proprietary SaaS these days if you cannot offer a
| _fundamentally unique capability_. Speed and scalability are
| conveniences more than a real business moat, I suspect.
| dzonga wrote:
| looks 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| One 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
| farceSpherule wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| Sounds like it could be very useful to others. Make sure to
| post it to HN if you decide to publish the source
| anonzzzies wrote:
| You are licensing it or? We would, especially after this type
| of thing, again, be looking for something open.
| eigilsagafos wrote:
| Would be open source for sure
| wadenick wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Update: 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
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Thanks!
| jjordan wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| you 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 wrote:
| Agree. 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| Yep and probably more like 99.999% of companies.
|
| 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)
| chatmasta wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but a single server won't solve
| redundancy and disaster recovery. That doesn't mean you need
| to adopt a fully distributed system - a read replica or even
| periodic backup should be sufficient - but it's not as simple
| as "just use a single server."
|
| Stackoverflow is famously powered by a cluster of three
| vertically scaled database servers.
| bigiain wrote:
| The complexity you avoid by choosing this 'scale vertically
| all the way' approach is _huge_.
|
| 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...)
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Love of money is the root of all evil.
| killerteddybear wrote:
| First Fauna graduates from Hololive, and now she graduates from
| being a company. Rip.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Hopefully 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 wrote:
| Although 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
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| I'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.
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