Distributed databases store data across multiple instances for scalability, locality, and reliability in applications that require high availability, scalability, and reliability such as financial institutions, telecommunications, gaming, IoT, and B2B SaaS. They offer geographical distribution of data to ensure local access while maintaining transactional consistency through auto-routing to the closest cloud region. Distributed databases can scale out horizontally by adding more nodes to handle high volume workloads, ensuring cost-effectiveness and flexibility compared to vertical scaling a single server. High availability and data resilience are critical aspects of distributed databases, ensuring applications remain operational even when parts of the database system fail or data cannot be lost due to single server corruption. Routing traffic for lower latency is another advantage, with distributed databases dynamically redirecting requests to ensure quicker access and minimizing delays. Despite their benefits, distributed databases come with challenges such as routing, data consistency, ACID support & features, cost, and provisioned requirements that need to be addressed when choosing a suitable solution like Fauna.