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Fauna Service Winding Down

fauna.com

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#31
post #19

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.

Shutting down the whole business is the loop hole leadership found to skirt around this policy.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

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).

> 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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#35
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?

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#36

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

> 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."

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#37

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

> 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/

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#38

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.

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#39

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 th…

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".

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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 b…

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).

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