This site is an archive of the key technical writing and announcements published on the Fauna blog between 2016 and 2025.

Fauna was a globally distributed, transactional database built from scratch for modern cloud applications. The company was founded in 2012 as a consultancy by Evan Weaver and Matt Freels, engineers who had scaled Twitter’s data infrastructure. Fauna set out to solve a problem they’d seen firsthand: existing databases forced painful tradeoffs between consistency, global availability, and developer experience.

The result was a document-relational database that offered strictly serializable ACID transactions across geographic replicas. At the time, this was widely believed to be impossible, and other database vendors that claimed various levels of distributed transaction support were typically lying. Nevertheless, Fauna achieved true strong consistency through a novel transaction protocol inspired by Calvin, and was verified by Jepsen. Queries in Fauna were written in FQL, a domain-specific language that focused on predictable, secure access from application code. FQL evolved into a TypeScript derivative and supported the same complex transactions, constraints, typing, and schema management that SQL databases do, as well as application-level access control and temporality. Fauna operations was fully multi-tenant, with performance, capacity, and security isolation that did not depend on hardware provisioning or virtualization.

Over nearly a decade, Fauna grew from a crude prototype to a high quality, scalable cloud service, hosted globally and supporting hundreds of customers. It was the most ambitious operational database project of its generation. Despite raising over $60M in venture capital, achieving its product goals, and hiring a new leadership team, the business side never really took off, and in March 2025, Fauna announced it was shutting down. As a contribution to the community, Fauna open-sourced its core database technology so the ideas could live on. Today nearly all cloud databases have serverless provisioning, multi-datacenter replication, and real transactional features, thanks to Fauna showing the way.

Papers

• 2019-03-05 — FaunaDB Jepsen Report (PDF)

• 2024-09-13 — Fauna Architectural Overview (PDF)

Blog

• 2016-09-26 — Welcome to the Jungle — Evan Weaver

• 2016-10-17 — Time-Traveling Databases: Exploring Temporality in Fauna — Daniel Abadi, Matt Freels

• 2017-04-06 — Spanner vs. Calvin: Distributed Consistency at Scale — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2017-09-20 — Achieving ACID Transactions in a Globally Distributed Database — Daniel Abadi, Matt Freels

• 2018-10-19 — Consistency without Clocks: The Fauna Distributed Transaction Protocol — Daniel Abadi, Matt Freels, Evan Weaver

• 2018-12-14 — Partitioned Consensus and Its Impact on Spanner’s Latency — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2019-02-21 — Serializability vs “Strict” Serializability: The Dirty Secret of Database Isolation Levels — Daniel Abadi, Matt Freels

• 2019-03-05 — Fauna’s Official Jepsen Results — Evan Weaver

• 2019-03-15 — A Comparison of Scalable Database Isolation Levels — Evan Weaver

• 2019-04-25 — Database Authority Andy Pavlo Joins Fauna as Technical Advisor — Chris Anderson

• 2019-05-03 — Demystifying Database Systems, Part 1: An Introduction to Transaction Isolation Levels — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2019-06-12 — Fauna Serverless Scheduling: Cooperative Scheduling with QoS — Matt Freels, Lewis King

• 2019-06-28 — Demystifying Database Systems, Part 2: Correctness Anomalies Under Serializable Isolation — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2019-07-25 — Demystifying Database Systems, Part 3: Introduction to Consistency Levels — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2019-08-23 — Demystifying Database Systems, Part 4: Isolation levels vs. Consistency levels — Daniel Abadi, Evan Weaver

• 2020-07-01 — The next chapter for Fauna: $27M and new leadership — Evan Weaver & Matt Freels

• 2020-12-09 — Comparing Fauna and DynamoDB — Evan Weaver

• 2021-01-20 — Postgres vs Fauna: Terminology and features — Evan Weaver

• 2021-03-24 — AWS Aurora Serverless v2: Architecture, Features, Pricing, and Comparison with Fauna — Evan Weaver

• 2021-07-28 — A comparison of transaction models in distributed document databases — Evan Weaver

• 2021-11-03 — Reducing complexity by integrating through the database — Evan Weaver

• 2022-06-03 — Stepping Back — Evan Weaver

• 2023-04-25 — Introducing the future of Fauna’s database language — Matt Freels

• 2023-08-21 — Beyond SQL: A relational database for modern applications — Matt Freels

• 2024-04-16 — Introducing Zero-Downtime Migrations to Fauna Schema — Matt Freels

• 2024-04-16 — Introducing Types and Enforcement to Fauna Schema — Matt Freels

• 2024-12-26 — Fauna’s 2024 Product Recap — Wyatt Wenzel

• 2025-03-19 — The Future of Fauna — The Fauna Team

Press

• 2018-08-06 — Evan Weaver: ‘When we started at Twitter, databases were bad. When we left, they were still bad’ — Stewart Rogers, VentureBeat

• 2018-09-07 — Founder Interviews: Evan Weaver of Fauna — Davis Baer, HackerNoon

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who supported, learned, used, evangelized, funded, debated with, worked at, or contributed in any way to Fauna, and special thanks to Fauna’s founding team members: Matt Freels, Brandon Mitchell, Jeff Smick, Erick Pintor, Marrony Neris, Attila Szegedi, Dhruv Gupta, Gayle Grasso, and Ed Ceaser.

So long, and thanks for all the birds. – Evan