Highlights:

  • Fauna, which was incubated by Twitter Inc. and has raised over USD 84 million in funding, is defined as a cloud-native serverless database with a distributed storage and computation structure that enables high performance and security levels.
  • Strong consistency guarantees, stringent security, authentication restrictions, backup and restore functionality, and event streaming are all features of Fauna.

Recently, Fauna Inc. announced the general availability of a logging feature with an initial focus on insights and query performance. Fauna Inc. is the creator of a distributed document-relational database that it offers via a cloud Application Programming Interface (API).

Thanks to the capability, customers can have more visibility into the elements affecting the performance and price of applications running on Fauna. Now, customers have access to information on read or write operations, compute and storage status, query runtimes, and the overall cost per inquiry.

This makes it possible for developers to regularly compare performance to requirements and look for ways to optimize cost and performance. Log files can be downloaded in near-real time for a particular database or region group within a specified time. Additionally, they can be coupled with well-known infrastructure observability systems.

Chief Executive Eric Berg said, “We give them all the underlying units, and then based on which plan they’re a part of and which region they’re in, they can calculate what the cost is for each one of those queries.” According to Berg, the decision is a part of the company’s “commitment to a more broad-based logging structure,” which will see the development of more solutions under the Fauna Log brand, including security, audits, and backups.

Fauna, which was incubated by Twitter Inc. and has raised over USD 84 million in funding, is defined as a cloud-native serverless database with a distributed storage and computation structure that enables high performance and security levels.

Opening the Black Box

By making the service accessible via an API, the business saves users from the burden of database management. However, visibility has been a drawback of the serverless architecture.

Berg, the previous chief product offer at Okta.Inc said, “Traditionally, serverless has been a bit of a black box. There’s something going on there but all I can see is the API.”

The lack of dedicated instances in the serverless architecture adds a layer of complexity to observability. Making the logs accessible is only the first step, according to Berg. He added, “Over time we’ll introduce more native functionality based on what users want to see.”

Strong consistency guarantees, stringent security, authentication restrictions, backup and restore functionality, and event streaming are all features of Fauna. It incorporates aspects of a document store, relational database, graph database, and time-series database.

Berg said, “We’re unique in combining the flexibility of a document store with that query power that someone associates with a SQL database. We then deliver strong consistency like the highest level of ACID [atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability] guarantees. Our service is also distributed by default across multiple geographic regions which means lower latency, additional reliability and availability.”

The firm increased its enterprise appeal last fall by allowing users to choose their preferred geography and cloud provider in addition to having access to any database within Fauna’s extensive global reach.