There is often a trade-off between a large distributed central store and several independent ones. The primary con of the former being incidents like this one,

There is often a trade-off between a large distributed central store and several independent ones. The primary con of the former being incidents like this one, whereas the con of the latter is separate systems to perform eventually consistent aggregation to support some centralized features adding complexity. I wonder if there is any value in GitHub decentralizing the metadata pipeline. So many of the actions are namespaced that this could be reasonable theoretically, at a large practical cost. On a related note, I often reach for Cassandra when starting projects knowing that building my application around its limited access approach has data replication benefits in the future. For all the flexibility benefits to devs given by SQL/RDBMSs, there are flexibility downsides.