This is very cool!<p>FoundationDB excites a lot of people because it's an extremely scalable and extremely reliable distributed database that supports ACID transactions, and which is both open-source and has Apple standing behind it. And yeah, all of that is pretty nice.<p>But arguably the real power comes from the fact that it exposes a relatively low-level data model that can then be wrapped in one or more stateless "layers". All of these layers write to the same storage substrate, so you can have your document database, your SQL database, your time-series database, your consensus/coordination store, your distributed task queue, etc., etc., but you're only actually operating one stateful system. Your SREs will thank you.<p>Writing these layers to be scalable and high-performance can be challenging, but it looks like Apple is actively doing it and willing to release the results to the rest of us. This also suggests that their previous open-sourcing of the MongoDB-compatible document layer wasn't a one-off fluke. All of this is very good news for everybody who needs to run databases in the real world.<p>Full disclosure: I worked on FoundationDB a long, long time ago.