2018 will be so awesome when apps start to become clientless as well...

I still don't get how you can store something without putting it anywhere. It's just "in transient" like electricity in a superconductor closed coil? hahaha

Not doubting it I just don't understand. Unless you're storing through "cache" client-side or direct RAM I don't know.

In case you are wondering what fauna is in general, it's an object-relational, temporal, geographically distributed, strongly consistent, multi-tenant, QoS-managed operational database. It's implemented on the JVM and queried via type-safe embedded DSLs like LINQ.

Somebody else asked this, but the answer got distracted onto (reasonably so) the CAP Theorem.

What is the difference between Fauna and DynamoDB? Especially since the article swaps them out (and explains the API differences).

DynamoDB is going to be having a replica you can read from within physical milliseconds of your lambda function (serverless is such a bad name, makes me think of P2P, anyways...) while it seems like Fauna is gonna have to make network calls out to your service...

Which when you pay per time with lambda, and you want lambda functions to be fast anyways, I don't see the point of Fauna? Note: I'm not saying Fauna is bad, it seems like a cool idea, but I'm not understanding how it is a superior alternative.

So lets say you don't want to pay for DynamoDB, it still seems like you'd be better off running something like a pure NodeJS database like Parse's open source server or https://github.com/amark/gun , either inside the lambda function directly or connecting to it (since it'll be on a nearby machine in AWS)?

What's the difference between "serverless" and "cloud"?

What's the difference between this and AWS' DynamoDB, or Aurora if you prefer RDBMS? A HTTP endpoint as the DB API? Seems like a lot of extra overhead, unless you're hosting a "client-only" webapp (which would previously have used Firebase, IIRC).

Also, this confuses me:

> FaunaDB can tolerate the loss of a minority of physical datacenters in a cluster without interruption. According to the CAP theorem, FaunaDB is a CP system.

CP means that consistency is favored over availability, yet "without interruption" tells me they favor availability over consistency during a partition.

If you want to skip directly to running code, these instructions (linked from the article) should get you to hello world. https://github.com/fauna/serverless-crud#installation

I really wonder what possesses people to use pullquotes

    WHAT POSSESSES PEOPLE
    TO   USE   PULLQUOTES

I understood that Lamda just freezes the code between calls. So any connection to a database just continues when the next call comes in. Only problem might be the server time-out for the connection if the time between calls is longer.

I never tried (yet) but if I need something like Fauna then my assumption was wrong ?

This is a prime example of where "serverless" means "someone else's server".

Is this DB ACID compliant? This is a major omission from the article, as I was considering this as a replacemnt for PostGres SQL As-A-Service offerings.

Sounds awfully like a server to me.

I was initially overly excited by AWS Lambda + API Gateway but now looking at the costs it's cheaper and less overhead to just run a highly available boxes.

For large organizations, I can see the benefit of moving to serverless particularly doing away with server ops for more slower and less frequent tasks..

but for fast response and cost effectiveness, unless AWS Lambda dramatically reduces costs to match a $5 / month digitalocean instance that will respond instantly and can take quite a beating for lighter requests, I'd be more wary-AWS bills can rack up very fast.

Meh - led by a couple of ex-Twitter infrastructure guys. No thanks.