Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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 it.






Snowflake article from 2018, I wonder if it's still true

The article is pretty vague, but nothing in it expired until at least 2023 :V

Yes. They hire engineers specifically to work on it.

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#choo...


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.

Snowflake uses it as primary database for their metadata. https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-sn...

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.


Griffin Bank UK uses it for our entire system (https://griffin.com)

Apple uses it for iMessage I believe.

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.

It's legacy technology. MongoDB is basically the same thing under the hood, and more "standard".

MongoDB is from 2009, while FoundationDB 2013, so wouldn't the notion of legacy be the reverse of what you wrote?

"Legacy" isn't about age, it's about adoption speed.

("Legacy" products have a negative growth rate.)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: