Author: Deba Chatterjee
Date: February 13, 2019
Originally posted on the Fauna blog.

The FaunaDB team is pleased to announce the availability of the Cloud Console, a tool that significantly improves the experience of interacting with database objects in FaunaDB Cloud. The new Cloud Console essentially comes with two distinct elements: an authentication service and a web application written in React with Redux. The Cloud Console is built on a robust framework and it replaces the prior dashboard that was limited to basic CRUD functionality. The following section summarizes some of the highlights of this Cloud Console release.

Integration of Github for User Authentication

Asking for basic user information like name, email, etc. during registration may look trivial, but still slows down developer productivity. With the new authentication system, you can now use your GitHub credentials to sign up with FaunaDB Cloud and alleviate the need to remember yet another password.

We also plan to expand the signup integration with Google, Twitter, Netlify, and other services in the near future.

New usage-based metrics reporting

Last August, we announced moving to a utility-based pricing model built on the following four usage attributes:

1. Read operations
2. Write operations
3. Outbound data transfer
4. Storage consumed

The Cloud Console marks the transition to this new pricing/usage model. The new reporting allows database users to not only track usage at the account level, but to also drill down to verify the usage of an individual child database. This makes tracking usage at a tenant level very simple. For your SaaS applications, you can now track each individual tenant down to the penny.

Improved Usability

The overall usability on object creation, data manipulation, and data retrieval has greatly improved. Unlike the previous dashboard, the Cloud Console allows its users to manipulate each document in its native form. Users will really like this close integration where they can create classes, indexes, and keys, all in few mouse clicks.

Upgrade your Cloud Plan

The FaunaDB Cloud Free plan is free forever, provided that you do not cross the predefined daily limits. The daily limits are sufficient to run a simple application with a small to medium-sized user base. For serious applications, it is recommended that you use the Serverless plan. The Serverless plan uses utility-based pricing on a pay-per-use basis. You are only charged for the amount of usage beyond the free daily limits. You can start with the Free plan and then use our self-service upgrade to choose the pricing plan that suits your needs as your business grows.

For a more in-depth overview watch our getting started video on the cloud console. It covers all the interesting new features that we have packed in this new release.

Roadmap

While we are very happy to announce the general availability of the Cloud Console, we would also like to provide a glimpse of what is slated for the next few releases. We are going to make the Cloud Console available for on-premises usage. That is, you will be able to download the binaries and run the Cloud Console code locally in your data center. We will also add direct data manipulation capabilities, bringing the power of Fauna Shell to the Cloud Console. You will be able to write and save user-defined functions directly through the Cloud Console. We also plan to bring bulk data import/export capabilities to the Cloud Console in the near future.

We plan to introduce new features to the cloud console at a regular cadence. If there are some you’d like to see, please reach me at product@fauna.com. I’d love to talk to you.