Metadata management is a crucial aspect of business applications, as it involves organizing data about other data to enhance accessibility and functionality. In cloud photo storage applications, metadata such as the uploader's information, upload date, and photo resolution are stored separately to facilitate easy searching and sorting. The reliability of metadata is vital, as its unavailability could render the main data inaccessible. Ensuring consistency across multiple databases storing the same metadata is also important for audit compliance and regulatory purposes, especially in multi-region applications. An example architecture using CockroachDB highlights how it can manage metadata efficiently in a multi-region setup, offering solutions to potential consistency issues with features like Change Data Capture and a multi-active availability model. CockroachDB’s ability to be deployed within Kubernetes and function as a distributed system ensures high availability and facilitates compliance, latency improvements, and seamless disaster recovery in such environments.