Fauna

Fauna is a cloud database provider that entered the serverless market in 2017. Fauna was founded by past employees of Twitter, which developed the Fauna database (FaunaDB) as a response to the common scaling issues they witnessed at Twitter. Fauna’s founders observed many firms utilized only 10% or less of its database hardware, which presumably indicated idle resources that could be addressed by shifting to a pay-as-you-go serverless model, such as Fauna DB.

The company offers a range of integrations with vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions, for serverless support services, website hosting, and development platforms. As of July 2020, Fauna had more than 25,000 developers using its service. Fauna introduced “Fauna Labs,” in July 2021, a collection of tools to help developers adopt database services by integrating Fauna into their apps.

In March 2022, Fauna launched ‘event streaming’ to provide developers with an open, push-based streaming method to detect real-time data changes at both a document and collection level. Moreover, Fauna also announced that its native attribute-based access control will be extended to event streaming to enable users to apply dynamic access control for critical data. In November 2022, Fauna launched “Intelligent Routing,” a service that streamlines the process by which requests and queries are routed to databases across geographies and cloud providers. It achieves this by offering a single endpoint to access any database across Fauna’s operational footprint. Fauna went on to launch a query language optimized for use with its platform to enable developers to create relational queries across semi-structured data in August 2023. Developers can use relational operators to query within or across documents, support business logic, and build JavaScript “Object Notation-like” result shapes that map to application requirements.

Key customers and partnerships 

As of July 2024, the company catered to over 80,000 development teams and had created over 300,000 databases.

Its key customers include Hanon Hill, Tyson, Unilever, Lexmark, and Cloaked.