A distributed database is a system that stores and maintains data across multiple instances for the purposes of scale, locality, and reliability. It was developed in reaction to the advent of the web and mobile age, which vastly increased usage, mobility, and uptime requirements for modern applications. Distributed databases are used in various applications such as financial institutions, telecommunications, gaming, IoT, and any organization that requires high availability, scalability, and reliability from their database systems. They offer geographical distribution of data, allowing users to be geographically distributed and on the move, while maintaining transactional consistency and ensuring the lowest latencies through routing to the closest cloud region. Distributed databases also excel in optimizing performance by rerouting traffic, effectively reducing latency. However, they come with challenges such as routing, data consistency, ACID support, cost, and provisioned requirements. Fauna is a distributed database that resolves these challenges with its strong consistency, serverless model, document-relational model, global scalability, and cost-effective features, making it a preferred choice for businesses seeking a flexible, efficient, and robust data management solution.