docs: add notes on operational considerations (#252)

Signed-off-by: Matt Vinall <boyvinall@gmail.com>

docs/faq/operations.md

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+# Operational Considerations
+
+This section is intended to give operations folk some useful guidelines on
+how to best manage a hydra deployment.
+
+Note: some of this section is specific to rethinkdb, which is the only persistence
+engine supported at the time of writing.
+
+## Managing Client/Policy Definitions
+
+It is useful for JSON files for client and policy definitions to be persisted outside
+of the hydra database itself. There are several reasons for this:
+
+- client secrets are stored in the database as a bcrypt hash, so you will not be
+  able to read back the secret.  If, at some later point, you need to update the
+  client definition then you need to delete the client definition from the database
+  and recreate it. So as to ensure that existing web/mobile/other apps are able to
+  continue operation, you will need to recreate the same client ID/secret - for which
+  you should use the `hydra clients import` command.
+
+A good storage platform for these files is Hashicorp [Vault](https://www.vaultproject.io). The full setup of a
+Vault deployment is beyond the scope of this document, please refer to the Vault website
+for this.
+
+With LDAP-based authentication configured, reading a client definition from
+the Vault "secrets" backend is as simple as:
+
+````
+$ vault auth -method=ldap username=john.doe
+$ vault read -field=myclient secrets/hydra/clients | hydra clients import /dev/stdin
+````
+
+The first command above will prompt you for your LDAP password and then create
+a file `~/.vault-token`. Note that you may wish to consider using token authentication
+instead of LDAP, but the above should be simple for ops folk to perform.
+
+If you need to update a client later, you can delete the client from hydra using:
+
+````
+$ hydra clients delete "<clientid>"
+````
+and then re-import as above.
+
+The same procedure can be followed for importing/updating policy definitions.
+
+## Recovering root client access
+
+If you somehow manage to lose admin access to your Hydra system, you can regain this
+by making use of Hydra's temporary root client creation - which is triggered when
+hydra is unable to find any client definitions upon startup. Due to the ID given to
+policy used for temporary root clients, you may need to also delete configured
+policies. With a rethinkdb connection `r`, you can perform these operations as follows:
+
+````
+r.db('hydra').table('hydra_clients').delete()
+r.db('hydra').table('hydra_policies').delete()
+````
+
+then: 
+
+- restart Hydra
+- re-import your client/policy definitions, as described above
+- delete your new temporary root client
+- ensure that any Hydra clients which have read keys from hydra are refreshed, possibly 
+  involving a simple restart to effect a timely update
+- play the maracas, FTW