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Fauna Service Winding Down

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Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#41

Post by readdit »

gigatree wrote: post #16
warthog wrote: post #11

The announcement is quite short and does not really explain why they are shutting down other than it being "capital intensive" Anyone know more?

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.

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?

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#42

Post by Workaccount2 »

jaapz wrote: post #26
picardo wrote: 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.

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

Generally just avoid absolutes as much as possible in your life. In most cases it will benefit you.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#43

Post by x0x0 »

xp84 wrote: post #32
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incl…

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#44

Post by hifix »

readdit wrote: post #41
gigatree wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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"

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#45

Post by jjordan »

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#46

Post by ncruces »

chrisandchris wrote: post #40
traceroute66 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'r…

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#47

Post by whatever3 »

eigilsagafos wrote: post #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…

Sounds like it could be very useful to others. Make sure to post it to HN if you decide to publish the source

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#48

Post by anonzzzies »

eigilsagafos wrote: post #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…

You are licensing it or? We would, especially after this type of thing, again, be looking for something open.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#49

Post by pier25 »

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#50

Post by eigilsagafos »

anonzzzies wrote: post #48
eigilsagafos wrote: post #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…

You are licensing it or? We would, especially after this type of thing, again, be looking for something open.

Would be open source for sure
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