How to build a user metadata store that lets you turn off PagerDuty

Engineers often dread PagerDuty alerts due to outages or hardware failures affecting critical systems like user metadata databases. These incidents not only impact team morale but also cost time and money, diverting focus from building and improving features that drive the business. When considering a migration or architecting a new application, it's crucial to build a user metadata store that works at enterprise scale without causing weekend disruptions. User metadata includes data associated with a specific user's account, such as preferences, usage history, access level and privileges, and sometimes logins and passwords. It is critical for maintaining a consistent and personalized user experience. Factors to consider when building or choosing a user metadata store include high availability, performance at scale, elastic scaling, automation, multi-region support, strong consistency guarantees, SQL support, and change data capture solutions. Enterprises often prefer buying a solution that meets these requirements rather than building one from scratch due to the complexity of the technical problems involved in creating an optimal metadata storage system. A managed service like CockroachDB can ensure all necessary features are available while taking most of the ops and management work off the team's plate, reducing the likelihood of PagerDuty alerts during non-work hours.