Fauna to shut down FaunaDB service in May

Fauna, the provider of the NoSQL database FaunaDB, has said that it will shut down the service by the end of May due to the unavailability of capital required to support the database service and market it.

“…after careful consideration, we have made the hard decision to sunset the Fauna service over the next several months,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that the sunset time will be May 30 at noon Pacific time.  

The company said all Fauna enterprise customers need to move their applications and data out of Fauna by that date, adding that after the specified date, all Fauna accounts and their associated data will be permanently deleted.

The move to shut down operations is expected to affect over 195 databases and over 3,000 development teams across several enterprises. These businesses have a little over two months to switch databases, as per Fauna’s sunset timeline.

However, the company said that it will provide support during migration, and for that, it has built new tooling and provided guidance on migration approaches in a migration guide.

Migration support only for premium plans

Fauna said it is willing to help enterprises with additional support or for any help with migration or transition via its Support Portal. However, this additional support is available only for enterprises that are on Fauna’s Startup, Pro, and Enterprise plans.

Customers on the free and pay-as-you-go plans will have to rely on the company’s community forum for help.

The move to cease the database service has attracted criticism from users of the database on X.One user by the handle “@ImSh4yy” pointed out that users or enterprises should “think twice” before vendor-locking themselves to an unprofitable startup for a critical part of their infrastructure.

Another user by the handle “@TweetsOfSumit”, who is the founder of an application named Parqet, wrote that his application was initially built on FaunaDB but he had to switch to MongoDB in a few months as it was cumbersome to develop using FaunaDB and the database had “crazy bugs when storing decimals.”

The company has also said that it will not accept any new customers.

At the same time, Fauna has committed to releasing an open-source version of Fauna’s core database technology alongside its existing open-source drivers and command line interface (CLI) tooling soon but did not provide any timeline.

The company said that the open-source version will enable FaunaDB’s user community to continue to access its core features, such as the document-relational data model and its database language (FQL). “We hope this will serve as both a valuable reference for database practitioners and will provide ongoing value to the wider developer community,” the company wrote.