Build low-latency global apps that meet data residency requirements

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Intelligent Routing to make it easier for developers to build global applications. Intelligent Routing gives developers a single endpoint to access any database, anywhere across Fauna’s global service. Combined with Fauna’s distributed architecture – Intelligent Routing ensures that applications have a consistent global user experience, resilience against regional cloud failures, and are staying compliant with data residency requirements.

To build a truly global application development teams have to provide a great user experience (UX), regardless of where users are located. Challenges in building applications with a great UX require navigating latency, data sovereignty, and reliability, especially as applications start to scale to users around the globe.

From a latency standpoint, databases located in a single region have round trip times that are typically at the rate of three-digit milliseconds for a global user base. Single region databases also suffer from inconsistent UX – if a database is located on the US east coast and clients request data from the east and west coast, they incur different latencies purely due to the distance.

To help reduce global latency, development teams can scale their single-region databases to be multi-region. But this introduces operational overhead to development teams that now have to deal with provisioning, replication, sharding, patching their databases. As teams scale globally, developers must also comply with data residency laws like GDPR for PII data.

Fauna’s Intelligent Routing provides developers with a single endpoint to access a strongly consistent, multi-region distributed database that optimally routes requests for the lowest latency, has replicas for redundancy against regional cloud failures, and provides region choice to help meet data residency requirements.

When creating a database in Fauna, you can choose whether your data resides in the US, EU, or both with Fauna’s Region Groups to meet data residency requirements like Europe’s GDPR. Previously within Fauna developers needed to specify db.us.fauna.com or db.eu.fauna.com endpoints in their client code — Fauna’s Intelligent Routing is now a single global endpoint, db.fauna.com, which handles routing across databases in any Fauna Region Group.

Fauna is multi-region by default within any Region Group you choose. In the US Region Group for example, if there is a request from the east coast and the west coast, Intelligent Routing makes sure they’re routed to the closest Fauna node to serve that request. This ensures that latency for your applications is low not just for one user but consistent for users across the US. With Fauna’s Classic Region Group, this example extends to a global user base accessing your application. Fauna’s strongly consistent, multi-region distributed architecture combined with Intelligent Routing protects against regional cloud failures by routing requests to a database replica in a region with no failures.

As a distributed, document-relational database, Fauna eliminates the burden of database administration, freeing developers to create. Fauna is trusted by companies of all sizes in over 108 countries across the globe and supports 3,500+ development teams and 170,000+ databases.

To learn more about how Intelligent Routing and other Fauna features can help you build applications faster with global scale, read our latest whitepaper, “Balance global user experience and data sovereignty in your database,” or sign up today and take it for a ride on our free tier.