Clarification on Unity Catalog Metastore - Metadata and storage

APJESK
Contributor


Where does the Unity Catalog metastore- metadata actually reside?

Is it stored and managed in the Databricks account (control plane)?

Or does it get stored in the customer-managed S3 bucket when we create a bucket for Unity Catalog metastore?

I want to clarify whether the S3 bucket we configure is only for managed tables/volumes, while the UC metadata itself stays with Databricks.