[wsh91]

I'm familiar with both; what disappoints me is the claim of novelty here with respect to autoscaling. That's just not true. To quote you:

"A serverless system must scale dynamically per request. Current popular cloud databases do not support this level of elasticity—you have to pay for capacity you don’t use. Additionally, they often lack support for joins, indexes, authentication, and other capabilities necessary to build a rich application."

That first criterion we absolutely meet, today. Cloud Datastore has been doing that for eight years now. We don't have joins, but we do have indexes, auth, multi-region replication and a whole lot more.

[jchrisa]

That's why it comes down to the details and the fit and finish. One neat feature is the ability to run Lambdas with a database access token corresponding to a particular user, which can then be passed through to sub-Lambdas (or it can even run with sub-permissions). Here is a blog post with quickstart instructions: https://serverless.com/blog/faunadb-serverless-authenticatio...

For instance, you could have a fire-and-forget self-service self-provisioning online shopping site builder, and bill database costs through to your customers (we give you that information in response headers).

You can also use FaunaDB to do consistent coordination between FaaS execution environments running in different clouds. So if you like a processing feature Azure makes available, but want to run your user facing servers in GCE, you can use FaunaDB to coordinate between the clouds.

[wsh91]

Again, neat stuff, but that's not what this link claims:

  * The first serverless database
  * The first active-active multi-cloud database
  * The first strongly-consistent multi-region database available to the public

None of these are firsts. I don't know if our (GCP) services are themselves the first of their kind (it's an ambitious claim and, as an engineer, I try to be careful about those), but Datastore meets at least two of those three and predates FaunaDB by several years.