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 without relying on synchronized clocks, a feat it achieved through a novel distributed transaction protocol inspired by the Calvin model. Fauna was queried through FQL, a purpose-built database language designed to feel like a programming language rather than SQL. Developers could express multi-step transactional logic, complex realtime and temporal queries, and custom response shapes in a single request.

Fauna positioned itself as the database for the serverless era: one that eliminated the operational burden of connection pooling, schema migrations, and replica management while delivering the consistency guarantees that serious applications demand. Over nearly a decade, it grew from a crude prototype to a high quality, elastic, multi-tenant cloud service, hosted globally and supporting hundreds of customers’ production applications.

Despite raising nearly $60M in venture capital and achieving its technical goals, the business side never really came together, and in March 2025, Fauna announced it would shut down. As a contribution to the community, Fauna committed to open-sourcing its core database technology (the transaction engine, document-relational data model, and FQL) so the ideas could live on as a reference for database practitioners and developers.

Papers

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

• 2019-03-05 — FaunaDB Jepsen Report (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 J. 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 J. 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 J. 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 J. Abadi, Evan Weaver

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

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

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

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