How well does CockroachDB run in practice, how much babysitting does it need? I am sure there are a bunch of people with experience running large clusters doing a high amount of transactions here.
In my limited experience the babysitting is minimal. But to be happy with CockroachDB you must have a strong need for a distributed database. If you come from say a Postgres db running next to your app, CockroachDB will feel slow and limiting.
I’ve used it in anger and it was honestly pretty great. There are def some differences from pg from dev perspective but operationally it was much better than any clustered/ha pg solution I’ve used including managed products.