Resources¶

Explore talks, papers, tools, and learning materials from the FoundationDB community.

Conference Talks¶

FoundationDB SIGMOD Paper Presentation

Official presentation of the SIGMOD 2021 Best Paper Award winner.

Watch on YouTube
Deterministic Simulation Testing

Will Wilson explains FoundationDB's legendary testing approach (2014).

Watch on YouTube

Year	Playlist	Highlights
2019	Watch Playlist	Production experiences, new features
2018	Watch Playlist	First summit after open source release

Talk	Speaker	Year
FoundationDB at Snowflake: Architecture and Internals	Markus Pilman (Snowflake)	2021
FoundationDB or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying	Markus Pilman (Snowflake)	2020
Novel Design Choices in Apache CouchDB	Adam Kocoloski	2021
QuiCK: A Queuing System in CloudKit	Apple Engineers	2021
Operating FoundationDB on Kubernetes	Johannes Scheuermann	2022

Topic	Company	Link
FoundationDB as an Identity Graph Database	Adobe
How Tigris Leverages FDB for Global Metadata	Tigris Data
Encryption in FoundationDB	Snowflake
Spark Connector for FoundationDB	Adobe
Control Plane for FoundationDB	Snowflake
Self Healing from Gray Failures	Adobe
RocksDB Storage Engine for FoundationDB	Adobe

SIGMOD 2021 Best Paper

FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store

The definitive paper on FoundationDB's architecture, winning the SIGMOD 2021 Best Paper Award.

Read Paper (PDF)
Record Layer Paper

FoundationDB Record Layer: A Multi-Tenant Structured Datastore

How Apple's CloudKit uses the Record Layer to serve hundreds of millions of users.

Read Paper (PDF)

Paper	Year	Description
QuiCK: A Queuing System in CloudKit	2021	Apple's queueing system built on FoundationDB
CloudKit: Structured Storage for Mobile Applications	2018	Apple's iCloud backend architecture

Resource	Description
GitHub Repository	Source code, issues, and discussions
Official Website	Project homepage and blog
Documentation	Official technical documentation
Downloads	Binary releases for all platforms
Release Notes	Version history and changelog

FoundationDB's layered architecture enables building specialized databases on top of its transactional core.

Record Layer

A structured data store providing schema management, indexing, and queries. Powers Apple's CloudKit.

GitHub · Documentation
Document Layer

MongoDB-compatible document database built on FoundationDB.

GitHub · Documentation

Tool	Description	Link
fdbexporter	Prometheus metrics exporter (Rust, actively maintained)
fdb-exporter	Prometheus metrics exporter (Go)
foundationdb-exporter	Prometheus metrics exporter (TypeScript)
fdb-prometheus-exporter	Prometheus metrics exporter (Go, legacy)
wavefront-fdb-tailer	Wavefront integration

Tool	Description	Link
fdb-kubernetes-operator	Official Kubernetes operator

Tool	Description	Link
go-ycsb	Database benchmark suite with FDB support

Beyond official Python, Java, Ruby, Go, and C bindings, the community maintains:

Podcast	Episode	Year
Antithesis BugBash	FoundationDB: From Idea to Apple Acquisition	2023
Data Engineering Podcast	Using FoundationDB As The Bedrock For Your Distributed Systems	2019
Software Engineering Daily	FoundationDB with Ryan Worl	2019

FoundationDB powers critical infrastructure at:

Company	Use Case
Apple	iCloud services via CloudKit (hundreds of millions of users)
Snowflake	Metadata management for cloud data warehouse
Wavefront (VMware)	Cloud monitoring and analytics
Tigris Data	Global metadata storage
Adobe	Identity graph database
Clever Cloud	FoundationDB operations and monitoring tooling