6 ms·

I'm always hearing about FoundationDB but not much about who uses it. I know Deno and obviously Apple is using it. Who else? I'd love to hear some stories about

• nish__ 9mo ago
  Apple uses it for iMessage I believe.
• adobrawy 9mo ago
  Snowflake uses it as primary database for their metadata. https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-snowflake-metadata-forward/ https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-sn...
• dpedu 9mo ago
  My company (Matterport, YC Winter '12) uses it to store metadata about 3d models. I really don't have that much to say about it because it's not my primary area of focus, and besides that, has been extremely reliable and hands-off, administration-wise. I particularly love that you can change redundancy modes on the fly, for example those listed here[1], and FDB will automatically re-arrange data to your liking, all without downtime. It handles offline/missing or replacing nodes quite well, and I credit my coworker's great efforts to make it work on top of Kubernetes for making our lives so much easier. 1: https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/configuration.html#choosing-a-redundancy-mode https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/configuration.html#choo...
• quettabit 9mo ago
  At s2.dev (a serverless datastore for real-time streaming data), we started with DynamoDB for our metadata store, but our access patterns kept running into per-partition throughput limits. We switched to FoundationDB, and it’s been great so far.
• CharlesW 9mo ago
  Snowflake uses it: https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-snowflake-metadata-forward/ https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-sn... Tigris uses it: https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/building-a-database-using-foundationdb/ https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/building-a-database-using-fo... A good collection of papers, blog posts, talks, etc.: https://github.com/FoundationDB/awesome-foundationdb https://github.com/FoundationDB/awesome-foundationdb
  • adammarples 9mo ago
    Snowflake article from 2018, I wonder if it's still true
    • throwawaydbb 9mo ago
      Yes. They hire engineers specifically to work on it.
    • p_l 9mo ago
      The article is pretty vague, but nothing in it expired until at least 2023 :V
  • preetamjinka 9mo ago
    https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/foundationdb https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/foundationdb This "Who is hiring" post for Tesla mentions FoundationDB [0]. Firebolt [1] uses it. FoundationDB is used at Datadog [2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306170 [1] https://www.firebolt.io/blog/decomposing-firebolt-transactions https://www.firebolt.io/blog/decomposing-firebolt-transactio... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36576775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36576775
• ghc 9mo ago
  There might be a good reason for the lack of stories. FoundationDB runs critical infrastructure I work on, but I never actually have to think about it. I've never spent less time thinking about a data store that I use daily.
• mannyv 9mo ago
  From what I've heard El Toro uses it to keep track of the billions of data points it harvests from the world every minute.
• arohner 9mo ago
  Griffin Bank UK uses it for our entire system (https://griffin.com https://griffin.com)
• otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
  It's legacy technology. MongoDB is basically the same thing under the hood, and more "standard".
  • jjtheblunt 9mo ago
    MongoDB is from 2009, while FoundationDB 2013, so wouldn't the notion of legacy be the reverse of what you wrote?
    • otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
      "Legacy" isn't about age, it's about adoption speed. ("Legacy" products have a negative growth rate.)