Building a GraphQL-native serverless backend with Fauna

Fauna is a serverless database that natively supports GraphQL, allowing you to create and manage databases with GraphQL queries and mutations. It auto-generates queries and mutations based on your GraphQL schema, offering a seamless way to interact with your data.

To get started with Fauna, you need to create a Fauna account, which you can do for free without a credit card. Once you have an account, you can create a new database, upload your GraphQL schema, and start interacting with your data using the auto-generated queries and mutations.

Fauna's serverless architecture offers key features such as no infrastructure concerns, automatic scaling, high availability and security, and a pay-for-value pricing model. This means you don't need to provision servers or manage infrastructure, and you only pay for the actual access to your data.

Fauna handles user authentication through User-Defined Functions (UDFs). You can create custom functions for registering and logging in users, which handle credentials securely. Fauna also supports integration with Auth0, Okta, and other authentication services.

The principle of least privilege in Fauna ensures that users have the minimum level of access required to perform their tasks. This is implemented through roles and attribute-based access control (ABAC), allowing fine-grained control over what data and functions each user can access.

You can integrate Fauna with your front-end application using Apollo Client for GraphQL. You need to set up Apollo Client with Fauna's GraphQL endpoint, manage authentication through session cookies, and query data using the client. Fauna's flexible API makes it easy to use with various front-end frameworks like Next.js, React, and Vue.

Fauna Query Language (FQL) is a proprietary language used to interact with Fauna databases. It follows a functional programming paradigm and allows for complex data manipulation and business logic to be executed within the database layer. FQL is similar to JavaScript and other functional languages like Scala.

You can find resources to learn more about Fauna and FQL on the Fauna documentation site, Fauna Labs on GitHub, and through various sample applications and repositories. Additionally, Fauna offers a Discord channel and Twitter support for any questions you may have.

Custom resolvers in Fauna are created using User-Defined Functions (UDFs) in Fauna Query Language (FQL). You define these functions in the Fauna dashboard and then map them to GraphQL queries or mutations using the resolver keyword in your schema.

Fauna ensures high availability and redundancy by spreading traffic across multiple regions. In case of an outage in one region, traffic fails over to other regions without any intervention required from your application. Fauna also maintains strong transaction consistency, ensuring you always have the most recent data.