Fauna Blog

Today we are excited to announce the preview release of FaunaDB Enterprise. With this release, FaunaDB’s modern query features and operational capabilities are available for deployment anywhere: developer workstations, on-premises datacenters, public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid configurations. This preview release represents years of design, development, and maturation of FaunaDB by a team with decades of collective experience building distributed systems.

FaunaDB Enterprise is designed to span any combination of public clouds, private clouds, or on-premises datacenters.

Neocities’ mission is to “make the web fun again by giving you back control of how you express yourself online.” Their user-friendly platform for creating and hosting web content provides a crucial first step for aspiring designers and programmers. Neocities hosts millions of simple HTML sites, so we thought we would demonstrate how easy it is to use FaunaDB with a single page application deployed to Neocities.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that abstracts multiple data sources and enables app developers to request data in the format they need, without requiring backend API changes. Because GraphQL decouples front- and backend, it can consolidate multiple APIs into a single endpoint.

GraphQL’s combination of expressiveness, performance, and flexibility has made it a runaway hit with developers, who find it more efficient than REST for many common use cases, and a natural fit for composing microservice calls.

In this post, I’ll create a GraphQL resolver using FaunaDB for a schema of posts, authors, and comments to support a blog engine. It’s ported from an original example for the Serverless Framework.

FaunaDB Serverless Cloud is the first database designed expressly to support serverless application development. This InfoQ article explores how FaunaDB empowers developers who’ve struggled to reconcile database infrastructure with modern development practices, like microservices, continuous delivery, and serverless.

FaunaDB Serverless Cloud provides an array of features that allow developers to securely build and run serverless applications without configuring or operating infrastructure. This has opened the door for a broad range of use cases - from mapping social networks, to incorporating change feeds into apps, to implementing heavy-duty financial applications that need ledgers and global distribution.

We’ve gotten some inquiries from customers about using FaunaDB with SpatialOS. FaunaDB’s global distribution, transactions, and temporal data model make it a great fit; I would like to explain why in detail.

What is SpatialOS?

SpatialOS is a cloud platform for building multi-agent systems: primarily online games, VR worlds, and physical simulations.

The game Worlds Adrift

Data elements called entities are sharded and replicated in memory across machines that can host co-located workers. Workers are stateless logic processors that can be written in a variety of programming languages. They subscribe to change events on entities, or respond to user input, and react by executing logic, querying external resources, and updating other entities.

In academia, they call this a tuple space. In game development they call it a big problem, so it makes sense that SpatialOS has attracted so much attention.

FaunaDB Serverless Cloud is a multi-master, globally distributed database as a service. Other cloud databases offer single-master configurations with global replication, or multi-master configurations with continental replication, but only FaunaDB truly supports low latency read and write access from anywhere.

But where does your FaunaDB Serverless Cloud data actually live? We’re very excited to show you with the new cloud status page.

Locations and infrastructure providers

I’ve been with Fauna since November 2016 and in the database industry for a decade. I rode the first wave of NoSQL and built systems that power your everyday shopping, airline and hotel bookings, online gaming, viral media, medical records, wind farms and factory automation.

Since those heady days, the NoSQL movement has matured. Everyone is onboard, from CIOs at the Fortune 100 to highschool hackers. The previous generation’s skepticism about leaving SQL behind is gone, replaced with real energy and a focus on practical solutions to business and operational problems. In the early days, even cutting edge adopters were full of questions. Today, people know what they need from a database.

In February, along with several other startups, we announced our new civic engagement policy.

The policy was inspired by the outpouring of political action after the presidential inauguration. But it was a natural extension of our existing family, diversity, and community focus, and reflected staff engagement that was already happening. It’s been about three months now and we are excited to share how the policy has empowered our team.