Author: Hassen Karaa
Date: Nov 23rd, 2020

It’s been a busy few months here at Fauna, and we’re very excited to share what we’ve been working on with you! Today, we released a slew of new capabilities to help Fauna developers collaborate more efficiently on shared databases, secure their accounts with multi-factor authentication, secure their applications with third-party identity providers, and improve application responsiveness with real-time document streaming. Using these features, development teams will be able to more easily and securely build sophisticated business applications with Fauna.

Team management

With team management, multiple members of your organization are now able to log into a shared team account with their own credentials. Team members can be assigned different roles including admin, developer, and billing, with a single user having the owner role.

More information about this new team management feature and role permissions is available in the Fauna docs.

Multi-factor authentication

With multi-factor authentication (MFA) support, Fauna users can now improve the security of their accounts by setting up a second layer of verification when they sign into Fauna. Team members will be able to set up a second factor of authentication that will be required upon login, using any OTP (one-time password) app such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator. MFA is an industry best practice that dramatically increases the security and safety of business data hosted in Fauna. To learn more about MFA, refer to the Fauna docs.

Authentication using third-party identity providers

Fauna’s unique API security model enables developers to query the database over any HTTPS connection, whether the connection originated from a web browser, a desktop app, or a mobile app. Using the newly-built integration with third-party identity providers (IdP), developers can now secure access to their Fauna databases with the same tools they use to protect other APIs in their apps.

Modern apps frequently use cloud-based IdPs to manage access to their apps and resources. Fauna now offers standards-based integration with third-party IdPs, such as Auth0 and Okta, to help developers manage and secure access to their database resources. Setting up this integration requires minimal code, allowing developers to bypass a typically complex and time-consuming component of application development.

In order to get started with this feature, please read our blog post where we build a sample app that uses an IdP for authentication. You can also read more about this feature in our documentation.

Real-time database streaming

Real-time database streaming has been a popular request from our developer community, and we’re happy to announce the availability of streaming for documents. This capability allows developers to avoid time and resource-intensive polling approaches, and can instead have the database notify their app, in real-time, when it detects changes to data stored in Fauna. With just a few lines of code, developers can use document streaming to build highly responsive, engaging user experiences quickly and efficiently.

Additionally, streaming data from Fauna is strongly consistent so the event delivery order always reflects the transaction order. This allows developers to simplify their code and application logic while using the most accurate data to power their applications.

Document streaming is currently available in early access; meaning that it is fully supported for use in production environments with some limitations. This functionality will be offered free of charge until it becomes generally available. Additionally, we are already working to expand the streaming capability to add support for streaming collections and sets of documents.

In order to get started with this feature, please read our blog post where we build a sample app that uses document streaming. You can also read more about this feature in our documentation.

Preview sandbox

In order to support our customers’ continuous delivery and continuous integration workflows, we’re excited to announce the availability of the Fauna Preview Sandbox. Fauna preview is a pre-production environment where customers can test and validate their applications before new versions are released to production. Customers will also be able to access Beta features in the preview environment.

With these new features, we are renewing our commitment to help customers efficiently build scalable, secure, and robust applications without having to worry about operating and scaling a database. Teams and MFA enable teams of developers to share databases and collaborate securely. The integration with third-party IdPs allows developers to secure access to Fauna the same way they secure access to their APIs. Streaming allows developers to build responsive apps and drastically simplify their application logic without sacrificing data accuracy.

We are excited to make these features available to you, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and experience with them in the Fauna Forums.