Region Groups

Region Groups is a new Fauna infrastructure that addresses data locality concerns:

  • Region Groups provide control over where your data resides: each database, its storage, and its compute services exist in a specific geographic region. The capability makes it possible to comply with data locality legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, while benefiting from Fauna’s distributed service features.

  • The nodes in a Region Group are physically located (relatively speaking) close together, which reduces the round-trip time to acknowledge consistent writes (compared to global replication), improving performance for many workloads.

Features

  • Region Group selection exists at the database level. You can create as many databases as you need in any Region Group.

  • When a database is in a Region Group, it is fully isolated from other Region Groups, and is never replicated to other Region Groups.

Limitations

  • A database and all of its contents, including child databases, can only exist in a single Region Group.

  • Fauna provides no mechanism to transfer a database from one Region Group to another. You could implement your own logic to export the documents from one database and import those documents into another.

Locations

Currently, Fauna offers three Region Groups:

  • United States

  • Europe

  • Classic (both Europe and United States)

Pricing varies by region. Please see Pricing for details.

Additional Region Groups may be added in the future. If you want to request a region, please contact us.

Replica distribution

  • United States: three replicas in the United States

  • Europe: three replicas in Europe

  • Classic: two replicas in the United States, one replica in Europe

Pre-existing databases

All Fauna databases which were created before the introduction of Region Groups are in the Classic Region Group by default.

How to use Region Groups

  1. Log in to the Fauna Dashboard

  2. Create a new database:

    The Dashboard’s New Database screen, feature the Region Group selector

    1. Specify a name for your database.

    2. Select a Region Group to contain your database.

    3. Optional: check the Pre-populate with demo data checkbox to create some data within the database.

    4. Click SAVE.

  3. Click HOME to view the overview of your databases:

    The Dashboard’s home page, showing databases and their Region Groups

    Notice that the database summary includes a Region Group column.

  4. Update your client applications to use region-specific connection details.

    Dashboard Connection domain GraphQL API

    US region group

    db.us.fauna.com

    graphql.us.fauna.com

    EU region group

    db.eu.fauna.com

    graphql.eu.fauna.com

    Classic region group

    db.fauna.com

    graphql.fauna.com

    Preview

    db.fauna-preview.com

    graphql.fauna-preview.com

    The Preview environment is where Fauna provides early access new to features. It is accessible by invitation only. Contact product@fauna.com for an invitation.

    See Connections for guidance on client application connections.

  5. Run your client applications!

Feedback

If you are using Region Groups and would like to provide feedback to Fauna, please support@fauna.com.

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