I would like to post some questions for the core team and founders of FaunaDB. I have not found any public statement in regard to these questions so I am posting them here.
-
Why did FaunaDB make the decision to be closed-source?
-
Why did FaunaDB make the decision to not offer an on-premise version?
-
Why are so many articles claiming that FaunaDB offers on-premise but in fact they don’t?
Moreover, Fauna does not bind you to the cloud. It is available as a managed cloud service or as a downloadable JAR, machine image, or container — that you can run on premise
A node is a single computer with its own IP address in which FaunaDB is installed and running. The Fauna nodes can run on all public cloud services, including Amazon, Azure, Bluemix, and Google, in addition to running on a private cloud, an on-premise solution, a virtual machine, a docker image, and several other platforms.
(Introduction to FaunaDB Clusters. FaunaDB is a mission critical, NoSQL… | by Fauna Inc | Fauna | Medium)
Importantly, Fauna doesn’t bind you to the cloud. It’s available as a managed cloud service or a downloadable JAR, machine image or container that you can run on premises.
Weaver: DynamoDB and Firebase are not general purpose. DynamoDB is a key/value database with some extensions, and Firebase is a hierarchical database–a model I haven’t seen since MUMPS. Neither of them are geo-replicated, and they both lock you into a single cloud vendor forever with no on-premises or multi-cloud options.
(same article as before) FaunaDB can be run on-premises or in the cloud. It is also provided as a service with no operational involvement currently running on AWS and GCP with the prospect on making it available on Azure soon.
There a more but just to name a few … ^
I really wonder why these decisions has been made. FaunaDB could indeed be a killer database and the company behind offering managed services could be worth a lot more with a lot more customers, but users like me (and i believe there are a lot of them just have a very hard time making the decision to move to fauna).
-
not offering on-premise is a risk as i have customers who might be interested in this and that would mean that i have to maintain two front-ends and potentially even two back-ends if the differences between my on-premise db and fauna are too big
-
not open sourcing makes it hard to trust faunadb as almost all companies that are not cloud providers are open source. Yugabyte and Mongodb don’t have the same functionality, sure but they would be an alternative for most faunadb users. Also, it would be cooler to be able to just post on github or create a pr for a feature i want instead of making a forum feature request post.
But maybe the community does not care as no one really participated in the recent threads about open source - but why does no one care? BTW, when I say trust I am also referring to the ability to attract great talent in the database business (Supabase CEO wrote a great article about that and there is a similar thread from a few days ago talking about this on the forum) and I am referring to the actual code. I know that Kyle (jepsen) tested the db but as far as I know these tests are always closed source.
So again… why is FaunaDB moving into this direction while they could easily be a killer database with open sourcing and on-premise options. IMO communities would also get much more active and looking at Supabase, it is really amazing to see what innovations emerge at the intersection of the core team and their users.