SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fauna, the distributed document-relational database delivered as a cloud API, today announced a new declarative schema and a suite of DevOps tooling and integrations that brings the flexible principles of modern CI/CD deployments to its enterprise operational database. The updates include the Fauna Schema Language (FSL), a modern command line interface (CLI), and GitHub and GitLab integrations. Combined, these features enable database development to match the pace of application development by incorporating database schema-level changes into broader CI/CD workflows – a crucial advancement for enterprise engineering teams tasked with building, scaling, and improving applications at every stage of development.
While the DevOps practices of automation, collaboration, and iterative development have streamlined development at the application and infrastructure layers, databases have historically been a bottleneck in these workflows. Database schemas are often rigid structures; the complexity of a data model grows as an application evolves, forcing engineering tradeoffs between speed or quality any time the schema changes – ultimately resulting in either increased risk of production application failures or reduced development velocity.
Bringing DevOps to the database
Fauna’s new declarative schema language enables a ‘Schema-as-Code’ approach which means that developers can fully automate changes within existing CI/CD workflows by applying IaC-like design patterns to schema. FSL enables users to define a database’s domain models, access controls, and user-defined functions in human-readable language, in addition to managing schema as a set of files in a code repository. Integrations with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD enable developers to automatically update the schema of any target database when changes are pushed, or when pull requests are accepted to a branch of a repository. Further, developers can test changes with a real dataset against a local container before pushing to CI/CD pipelines and production. The combination of native functionality and integration with leading CI/CD tooling ensures the application and database are managed concurrently, making the process of testing and developing a database both fast and repeatable.
FSL pairs well with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tooling like Pulumi, allowing developers to trigger database actions from Pulumi resources without any manual intervention. Customers can provision lower level infrastructure primitives through their IaC platform and then invoke FSL or a developer’s tool of choice to implement schema. With greater confidence that database updates produce their intended effect before going into production, engineers can accelerate code reviews and workflows within the context of their broader CI/CD pipeline.
“The value of Fauna’s DevOps tooling is in its flexible APIs; we can easily and quickly integrate those API into any automated deployment tool,” shared Marcelo Reyna, Head of Infrastructure at Differential, a digital agency supporting enterprise customers like Lexmark, TaylorMade, and P&G. “Fauna simplifies data access controls directly on the database, so there’s both added security and minimal engineering required to manage it – we can push and pull schema-level updates with DevOps tools already in our stack like Pulumi and GitHub. It’s incredible that we are able to create and manage a Fauna database with a single Pulumi resource without any additional infrastructure.”
Deploy faster with a unified development control plane
What differentiates Fauna’s DevOps approach from other databases is the ability to version and source control database schema with application code at a higher level of abstraction without incorporating additional, non-integrated third-party tooling. Fauna approaches this in a declarative manner, compared to the imperative approach of many database vendors. Incremental and continual value accrues to the business because this means that development teams experience a faster time to delivery and the flexibility to adapt to shifting access patterns and revenue generating opportunities as an application evolves, all within the end-to-end deployment workflow developers are familiar with.
“Enterprises want to move fast while delivering on business objectives while minimizing risk, but legacy database workflows and release processes have made that difficult,” said Tyson Trautmann, VP of Engineering at Fauna. “With this recent launch, Fauna’s customers can apply state of the art development and release best practices to their data model, resulting in dramatically increased speed and release safety. These new capabilities build on Fauna’s differentiated document-relational model and are delivered in an ergonomic and convenient way.”
To get started with these new features, check out the FSL documentation and GitHub and GitLab tutorial.
About Fauna
Fauna is a distributed document-relational database that is delivered as a cloud API. Fauna’s multi-region architecture, powered by its underlying Distributed Transaction Engine (DTE), provides strong consistency, low latency, and high availability. Fauna’s API delivery model means this is all available to development teams with no database operations required. An intuitive database language inspired by Typescript supports relational features such as foreign keys, views and joins on top of documents. Developers choose Fauna to build new applications faster and confidently scale existing ones across regions and the globe. Builders and scalers like Tyson Foods, Unilever, Lexmark, Intelliculture, Hannon Hill, Cloaked, DTLR, Insights.gg, and Azion trust Fauna to accelerate development and solve mission-critical challenges. Backed by premier venture investors Madrona Venture Group, ADDITION, GV, and CRV, Fauna is headquartered in San Mateo with an experienced leadership team hailing from Microsoft, Okta, Twitter, Amazon, and Oracle. For more information visit fauna.com or follow us at @fauna.
