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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
¹ https://jepsen.io/analyses/faunadb-2.5.4
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.
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.