Fauna Service Winding Down

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.