View from the top by Evan Weaver, CEO
FaunaDB is a cloud-first database for modern applications. Our goal at Fauna is to make it effortless for developers to store and manage application state securely and reliably. Featuring multi-API interfaces including native GraphQL, FaunaDB brings a low-latency transactional data API directly to the browser in a serverless form factor.
CTO Matt Freels and I started Fauna in 2012 after learning from the challenges we addressed as part of Twitter’s backend infrastructure team. Back then, if our data services went down, Twitter went down—which was unacceptable then, and is even more so today.
Today, digital apps are no different. Customers interact with businesses digitally, via mobile phones and tablets. All business interactions are increasingly cloud-hosted and mobile-enabled, and business systems require databases that are global, consistent, and scalable in the cloud with an interface that developers will find easy to adopt. So we took the lessons from systems we built at Twitter to formulate the architecture of the FaunaDB platform. To solve the specific problem of strong data consistency at scale, our core is inspired by Calvin, a method for fast, globally distributed transactions in partitioned systems, pioneered by Dr. Daniel Abadi at Yale.
As a result, FaunaDB stands out in the cloud-native database market as a multi-model database that is also 100% ACID compliant, and can resolve transactions in globally distributed environments with the strictest isolation levels, at the lowest possible levels of latency. FaunaDB’s multi-API interface allows developers to pick query models they are most familiar with, and interact with their data using relational, document as well as graph models. We also built FaunaDB to be easy to deploy and manage, and operationally resilient. It ensures that companies are best able to avoid experiencing an outage, or worse, data loss.
Many startups and established companies are trying to solve these problems—but the truth is, it’s too hard and too resource-intensive. We have a unique advantage in our experience from Twitter, in both developing and operating a system able to meet global demands for extreme scale. Just as Oracle was the general-purpose system for business data in the 1980s, Fauna is the only company building this type of general-purpose database for the present era.
Visit https://fauna.com/ to download our FaunaDB Enterprise white paper, or to get started with Fauna Cloud.
FaunaDB
https://fauna.com/