The team behind the distributed serverless database Fauna has recently announced plans to shut down the service by the end of May. While the managed database will be terminated soon and all customers will have to migrate to other platforms, Fauna is committing to releasing an open source version of the core database technology alongside the existing drivers and CLI tooling.
Started in 2011 as FaunaDB by the team that scaled Twitter by building its in-house databases and systems, Fauna tried for many years to combine the power of a relational database with the flexibility of JSON documents. Fauna was designed to scale horizontally within a data center to maximize throughput while easily spanning globally distributed sites, ensuring reliability and local performance. With the vision of enabling “applications without database limits” and claiming use by more than 80,000 development teams, the service has now reached the end of the road.
According to the Fauna Service End of Life FAQ, the Fauna service will be turned off on May 30th, and all Fauna accounts will be deleted. The team writes:
Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently.
Yan Cui, AWS Serverless Hero and serverless expert, writes:
Sad to see Fauna go. They were one of the first truly serverless databases on the market.
Ankur Raina, senior staff sales engineer at Cockroach Labs, summarizes:
The DB market is brutal (…) Getting large customers on Serverless databases is hard. (…) Fauna was trying to build the document model of MongoDB, consistency & geo distribution of CockroachDB but without any ability to run it beyond two cloud providers.
The sunsetting of a once-popular database has sparked many reactions within the community. In a popular Hacker News thread, Pier Bover, founder of Waveki, writes:
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.
User strobe adds:
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. (…) Hope that something useful will be open sourced as a result.
Peter Zaitsev, open source advocate, questions instead:
While there is no alternative history, I wonder what would have happened if Fauna had chosen to start as Open Source, become 100x more widely adopted but monetize a smaller portion of their customers due to “competing” Open Source alternatives.
The market of distributed databases that once competed with Fauna includes Google Spanner, PlanetScale, CockroachDB, and TiDB, among others. A migration guide is now available, offering the option to create snapshot exports, with the exported data stored as JSON files in an AWS S3 bucket. For smaller collections, data can also be exported using FQL queries.
