#182 - FaunaDB - Client Serverless Computing

This week, Chris and Martin chat to Evan Weaver, CTO and co-founder at Fauna. The company has developed a database as a service, available simply through a globally available API. Fauna calls the platform “client serverless”. How can a database be made globally available and still guarantee performance, resiliency and most important, data consistency? Of course, you will need to listen to find out.

As we learn in this podcast, a database accessible via API provides the ability to write applications that talk directly to the platform, with application use cases for mobile and IoT.

Evan references the Calvin algorithm. A detailed paper can be found here. More information on Google Spanner is available through this link. Google Percolator is documented here. Finally, here’s a link to an article that discusses the idea of the Sysplex timer on the mainframe, a feature from 1990, that still remains important today.

If you’d like to try FaunaDB for yourself, get over to https://fauna.com/ and sign up.

Elapsed Time: 00:35:28

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:02:30 – We’re seeing a return to new “client server”
00:03:37 – Database users could be devices, not humans
00:05:30 – We’ve gone full circle to needing powerful backends
00:07:09 – Fauna developed out of the need to scale Twitter
00:09:00 – How does FaunaDB manage typical operational challenges?
00:11:07 – Single clock – mainframe parallel Sysplex
00:13:48 – Technology reinvents itself
00:15:07 – What is CALVIN?
00:19:00 – Web APIs aren’t long-running transactions
00:23:00 – Partitioning by geography is the typical way to maintain performance
00:24:21 – What are the use cases for Fauna?
00:27:00 – How are the operational challenges addressed?
00:30:00 – Can users try FaunaDB?
00:33:37 – Wrap Up

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