Posted about this in the past, but what really got FoundationDB on my radar was a demo at a developer conference, back in 2014-ish. They had the database running across a bunch of machines, with a visual showing their health and data distribution. One team member would then be turning machines on and off (or maybe unplugging them from the network) and you could see FDB effortlessly rebalancing the data across the available nodes. It was a very striking, impressive presentation (especially as we were dealing with the challenges of distributed Cassandra at the time).
The beginning of this video has some of that: https://youtu.be/Nrb3LN7X1Pg
What a great story and really interesting courage to double-down on improving the testing even when a critical flaw that testing should have found was found. Wish that they had managed long enough for Snowflake to keep them alive, but then we wouldn't have Antithesis as a service so silver lining.
I've looked on FoundationDB and on paper it looks great. But it never got momentum, like, say, MongoDB. Is this just a matter of hype or it is not that great as advertised?
Does anyone know how widely FoundationDB is now being used at Apple? I know they run a huge Cassandra cluster, does this serve a different use case?
FoundationDB has been growing as my favorite database lately. Even though it is only key-value store.
Out of curiosity: what are the scale limits of FoundationDB? What kind of issues would it start to have? For example, being able to store all of Discord messages on it?
I see blog posts of Discord moving to Scylla and ElasticSearch, but I wonder if there would be any difficulties here.
Does anyone know of cool things built with fdb? I’ve been aware of it for a while and it seems very cool but I haven’t seen a lot of details about how folks are using it.
Nowadays being rewritten into Swift.
"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" by Konrad Malawski (Strange Loop 2023)
+1 really enjoyed this
I can't put my finger on it but there's a weird tension between the two Dave's in this video. Almost like Rosenthal is trying to impress or earn the praise of Scherer.
Is there a backstory between these guys / FDB?
So if it has been acquired by Apple, it's a failure, isn't it? Most things acquired by Apple get unmaintained or change completely, or disappear. Being "open-source" here doesn't bring any guarantees to any third-party user about maintenance or long-term life. It should be a serious no-go indicator for anyone willing to build something with it.
Nice having this backstory (fantastic production value too, impressive start to this podcast). Dis-aggregating the responsibilities of the DB into multiple pieces just feels so logical, helps make sure each piece can scale. Deterministic Simulation Testing gets mentioned in the video & was way ahead of it's time here. https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/testing.html
Hacker News is here too! From July 2012 (78 points, 72 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719
For a general introduction, I enjoyed the recent submission How FoundationDB works and why it works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37552085 https://uvdn7.github.io/notes-on-the-foundationdb-paper/