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Fauna Service Winding Down

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Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#61

Post by picardo »

tysont wrote: post #55
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.

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 i…

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#62

Post by da02 »

tysont wrote: post #55
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.

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 i…

Are there any interesting DBaaS that are on your radar this year?

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#63

Post by shermantanktop »

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#64

Post by sowbug »

traceroute66 wrote: post #24
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #20

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/

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.)

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#65

Post by UltraSane »

pier25 wrote: post #49

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 b…

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#66

Post by bombcar »

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…

It’s webscale!

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#67

Post by strobe »

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#68

Post by rjbwork »

UltraSane wrote: post #65
pier25 wrote: post #49

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 b…

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#69

Post by grounder »

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.

Re: Fauna Service Winding Down

#70

Post by srhtftw »

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

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