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Comment by websiteapi

7 months ago

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 uses it: https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/how-foundationdb-powers-sn...

Tigris uses it: 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

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.

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.

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.