text stringlengths 0 2.02k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Evan Weaver:** So it means we have a very high bar as a cloud operator, because we developed the software and we operate it ourselves. Fauna is hosted on AWS and GCP right now, and we'll go to other cloud providers shortly. |
We've taken that burden off you, and it's part of the value you get as a customer, but we also want to make sure we don't eliminate the transparency there that you would get from a managed cloud solution, or something you're physically operating yourself. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I noticed you have an entire subdomain on the website called trust.fauna.com, and I think that's really what it comes down to, right? I'm kind of having a looser hold over things that are historically precious to me, or held tight, in terms of, like you said, operational transparency. I used to b... |
So like you said, you have a very high burden of trust, and like you said, it behooves you guys to be as transparent as possible. It looks like you have all sorts of white papers, and reports, and compliance things... And the entire goal, I'm assuming, of that subdomain and of these efforts is like, a) being trustworth... |
**Evan Weaver:** Right. Yeah, you don't wanna do the work anymore, but you still wanna supervise that work. If you pop the drive out and it's the wrong drive - well, that's your own fault. Honestly, that feels a little bit better than if someone else popped out the wrong drive on your behalf. \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Evan Weaver:** Like, "What the heck? Who are these idiots?" |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Like, I could blame myself, but -- yeah, somebody else is way worse. |
**Evan Weaver:** Right. And then you're like, "I learned something. It was all worth it." Well, we'll see. We need to make it possible to supervise that operation to understand how everything works. You need to understand it so you can communicate effectively with our own support team if you're having an issue, and tha... |
So we're in transition... Especially, you see it with things in the serverless space; you mentioned Netlify... Netlify and Vercel, their deployment and hosting systems. A lot of the work that edge providers are doing with eventually consistent data and caching, and that kind of thing. Lambda, and moving to more dynamic... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:33\] Yeah, you say no until you say yes, basically, and that's where trust comes in. You mentioned before around technical marketing, you had some challenges... In especially the outlook on database, you have to think so far down the road to do what you're doing with Fauna, because you're sort ... |
**Evan Weaver:** Yes, choosing to adapt Fauna or something like it - there's really nothing else like it. But imagine some day there is -- you know, choosing to develop a system which is that novel really comes down to two things; it comes down to that trust, it comes down to having an implementation and architecture, ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was just gonna ask about the interface itself, because like you said, you're not doing SQL, and you come from a NoSQL kind of roots, from the founding team... So what is the API? Is it Mongo-esque, is it a brand new thing? |
**Evan Weaver:** So we offer a GraphQL API which is compliant with most of the GraphQL standard. It lets you get up and running very quickly. And GraphQL is great, but it's also incomplete as a query language. It doesn't support mutations directly. It's about composing existing services and datasets on the read side, a... |
We also offer our proprietary language called FQL, which is a functionally-oriented query language which lets you write very complex business logic and mutation statements, and has a rich standard library. For that, there are DSL for JavaScript, and C\#, and Java, and Scala, and Go, and Python, and what have you, that ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I'm looking at this FQL, and this is very much in the vein of what SQL folk would at least look at... I mean, select all, select where, select where not, alter table, truncate table... At least at the very outset, it seems familiar, even though it's its own thing and proprietary. |
**Evan Weaver:** At its heart, Fauna is a document relational database, so the relational concepts are there. You have foreign keys, you have unique indexes, you have constraints, you have views, you have stored procedures... But like you said earlier on the podcast, you're developing an app, you're probably doing it i... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[36:24\] So what are some perfect use cases for this, if you were to describe either an application that we all know, or a business, or even - you could make one up if you like, where it's like, "These people should be using Fauna, and here's why" or "This is using Fauna, and here's why", or "I would ... |
**Evan Weaver:** Not everybody. Obviously, a lot of Fauna's features were inspired by things that we wanted to have at Twitter, and we're forced to develop and forgo on our own. Fauna is really design for the modern web 2.0+ application world. With SaaS, in particular - I would say the majority of our customers are bui... |
The thing that these all have in common is that -- you know, there's a wide variety of customers and people interacting with datasets that interact with it in a soft, real-time way; they interact with it from the web, from mobile applications... You know, it's all the apps you use today. |
What we don't do is analytics. We're not a olap database, we're not a data warehouse. We're not a cache for some other database. The transactional consistency does have a cost in throughput and latency, so if all you want is a cache, you should go get memcache or something like that. We're not an information retrieval ... |
We fundamentally don't really believe in the classic polyglot persistence attitude where you pick the best tool for every single kind of query pattern you might have in your app. Databases are heavy pieces of infrastructure. It's hard to move data around. You don't wanna have too many of them. So the more general-purpo... |
**Break:** \[39:41\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So Evan, it seems, based upon your resume, that you've been doing this for a while. You mentioned your time at Twitter, employee 15, 2008 to 2011... I'm a LinkedIn stalker, I do it quite well, so I saw that Fauna Research was there, May 2012, which was obviously just after Twitter, to January 2016..... |
**Evan Weaver:** That is true. Most of my -- although I studied bioinformatics in grad school and I worked on gene orthologs in chickens, most of my career (really all my career) has been working around problems in the data systems. |
After grad school I worked at SAP briefly, and then I worked at CNetwork and I did chow.com and urbanbaby.com. And Urban Baby was a threaded, asynchronous, real-time chat for moms, which has a lot of similarities with Twitter, if you stop limiting the audience only to moms... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Evan Weaver:** It was hard to scale that on MySQL, and then Twitter was also scaling on MySQL, and we saw the problems in a number of ways there. After Twitter, we weren't sure. Me and my co-founder, Matt Freels, we wanted to start a company, but we weren't really sure what we wanted to build... So we did consolidate... |
\[44:07\] Did they need a purpose-built social graph that could do millions of requests per second? Probably not. So commercializing this stuff we had literally built at Twitter didn't make a lot of sense, but we started to get this idea of a better data platform and a better data system... |
And I think one of the things which is a little bit unique about Fauna - there are more deep tech startups now... The last couple of years have changed things in terms of the funding market for companies that are based on real hardcore technology, and focused on solving those problems first before bringing them to mark... |
Luckily, we got funded early on, and we got the time to invest in solving these problems that remained unsolved, foundational problems in computer science like the distributed consistency problem, and also the opportunity to bring it to market. That also meant -- you know, we were a little too early to market. When we ... |
The idea that you'd access a data API that scaled on your behalf without your intervention, without you having to go twiddle knobs and that kind of thing was weird. People didn't want it. So it took us some time to both mature the technology and figure out how to go to market, wait for the market to be ready for us... ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's like a perfect-ish storm. To just touch on your funding... 2016 was your seed round, 2017 it seems like, at least based on Crunchbase data - if this isn't accurate, you can tell me and I'll go back and edit it and make it correct if it's not... But early 2017 was a series A; another serie... |
**Evan Weaver:** Yeah, I think that's true, in particular Mongo, and then Elastic, and then Snowflake really changed things in terms of the capital markets appetite for doing real deep tech infrastructure software. We've raised 16 million dollars, we've brought on Bob Muglia as chairman at the end of 2019, we've brough... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh... |
**Evan Weaver:** And we were kind of surprised... There were a few other companies that set out to solve this same problem around the same time, in particular Cockroach and Yugabyte. But they also found -- a different technology than us, but they also found the market wasn't really ready for this kind of interface mode... |
We didn't wanna replicate those old interfaces; we really wanted to build an interface which was for where the world was headed, where the new stack was being built; for people who were building this dynamic edge and mobile and SPA browser applications... |
\[48:11\] In particular, we fit well with blockchain and crypto stuff. There's no commitment to SQL in that world. People are looking for the newer, better language, the newer interaction model, and these kinds of things. It's easy to adopt Fauna if you already use GraphQL in your organization in particular, because we... |
I think one mistake people sometimes make is they're like, "Well, how do I migrate my existing Postgres cluster to Fauna?" You can if you really want, but it's not what we're really designed to be. We're designed for new workloads and for augmenting the existing systems. So if you have a big Postgres cluster, whether i... |
**Jerod Santo:** You know, the fair line in the sand to draw, especially considering you're taking on large problems, and the difficulty of providing migration paths for the older technologies, or adaptors, or whatever it would be, will take you off of where you're trying to go with Fauna, and saying "Yeah, well, we're... |
**Evan Weaver:** Green field, brown field... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Green field, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Leave your brown field alone, and here's your green field over here, and it's built on Fauna. I think that's a decent place to position yourself. But what about all the free offerings out there? So Fauna maybe has some free as beer for a little while... I actually didn't look at your pricing page yet, ... |
**Evan Weaver:** So we are also free. In fact, we can be more free than other cloud database vendors, in particular like the -- the Fauna architecture, it's a true API, it's multi-tenant, the isolation is internal to the database kernel... So you're never paying for idle capacity. |
With most cloud databases you sign up and you get like a 30-day trial, because they deployed some container or VM and it's costing them $100/month. That means some salesperson looked at your email, decided you were worth spending $300 on a database date and you get your 90 days. Then after that, they call you and they'... |
Fauna - we have no fixed costs for a new user. We only have to pay for resources actually consumed. So anyone can sign up for Fauna for a free forever database. You don't need a credit card, or anything. Then if you start to scale, then you can start to pay for it by the resources consumed. So the actual economics of i... |
\[52:06\] I think some people do care about open source. Fauna is not open source, it's only cloud; it's only proprietary. But the majority of the market, in our experience, cares about the interface more than they care about the codebase. The number of people who are gonna crack open their database and make some fix i... |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you all patch MySQL at Twitter? |
**Evan Weaver:** Oh, yeah... \[laughs\] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.