News

Fauna Takes 'First Serverless Database' to the Cloud

• By David Ramel
• March 16, 2017

Fully onboard with what it calls the serverless revolution, San Francisco start-up Fauna Inc. launched FaunaDB Serverless Cloud, described as the "first serverless database."

The new offering is based on FaunaDB, an "adaptive operational database" that serves real-time data while leveraging cloud capabilities such as elastic scaling, lower operational overhead, pay-as-you-go pricing and improved time to market for developers, the company said.

"FaunaDB Serverless Cloud is also the first cloud database to seamlessly span both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, replicating data in realtime for multi-cloud availability," Fauna said in a statement yesterday. Support for the Microsoft Azure cloud is planned for later in the year.

Developers can use FaunaDB to hook into function-as-a-service systems such as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions. Or, for those wishing to avoid cloud infrastructure lock-in, applications can also be ported to FaunaDB On-Premises (with full availability planned) in enterprise datacenters or private clouds.

It's a natural fit for the AWS cloud, however, as Fauna's Chris Anderson demonstrated in a blog post last month that detailed how to connect an AWS Lambda application with the serverless cloud.

Company CEO Evan Weaver wrote his own blog post about the product's launch yesterday, in which he claimed the following industry milestones:

• The first database built for serverless applications.
• The first globally replicated database as a service.
• The first transactional, strongly consistent, multi-region database available to the public.

The company, founded by ex-Twitter engineers, has been working on FaunaDB for four years, and the cloud database has already been put to use in some large enterprises, such as NVIDIA, Medium and ThinAir. The company has also partnered with Serverless Inc. in its efforts to help developers adopt serverless architecture.

"With serverless computing, your application still runs on servers, but all the server management is done by AWS," the Amazon site says. "At the core of serverless computing is AWS Lambda, which lets you run your code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, and it takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability."

In addition to the serverless cloud database, Fauna has an enterprise edition available in beta for running on private clouds or on-premises deployments.

FaunaDB Serverless Cloud is available for a free trial, and pricing information can be found here.