TL;DR: RethinkDB databases on Compose will be available for the foreseeable future.
The unfortunate news that RethinkDB Inc is closing its doors as a commercial entity has led people to ask us, as hosts of RethinkDB database deployments, what our intentions are with the database.
Before that, we have to say that we really enjoyed working with our friends at RethinkDB and we hope they'll all find new positions in the industry where they can continue to be most excellent. We understand how hard the startup business is and that things don't always work out as expected.
Regarding RethinkDB the database, the RethinkDB code base is open source, stable, feature rich and working well for many of our customers. It's a tribute to the engineering work of the RethinkDB team that they have produced software of this quality. As we write this, the details on how the open source project that is RethinkDB will be maintained and developed in future have yet to be revealed, but in his blog post Slava says they are working towards establishing "a sustainable future for RethinkDB as an independent open-source project."
We expect that these plans will ensure that the RethinkDB codebase will be maintained by an expanding RethinkDB community allowing the database to continue to flourish. Compose will work with the RethinkDB open source community as closely as we have worked with Slava and the RethinkDB Inc team and we look forward to seeing RethinkDB continuing to raise the bar in the NoSQL database space.
What this all means, practically, is that Compose will continue to be the leader in hosting RethinkDB databases and will provide that service, as a first class database on Compose, in the future.