John Vincent writes about operations, PaaS, monitoring, systemd, and running infrastructure on-premises.
Commenters recommend his on-prem post as required reading, warning 'here be dragons', and cite his PaaS post for its critical take on the 12 Factor model.
This blog post about the problems running databases in container-based PaaS is a good starting point: http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2014/06/22/feedback-on-paas-realism/
Generally, you want to be able to answer these questions when it comes to operating your databases:
What are the failure points?
What is the impact of each failure point?
What are the SINGLE points of failure?
What is my recovery pattern?
What is my upgrade experience?
What is the operational overhead in the applications running ON the product?
What is my DR strategy?
What is my HA strategy?
Pure Docker, and no other tool that we are aware of in the docker/container ecosystem that we are aware of provide really good answers to these questions when it comes to databases. That is what I mean when I said running databases in containers in a nightmare. It is possible today, for sure, but it is extremely complex operationally and its why it is so rare to see prod databases running in production today.
Obligatory lusis quote and link...
"Devops means giving a shit about your job enough to not pass the buck. Devops means giving a shit about your job enough to want to learn all the parts and not just your little world.
Developers need to understand infrastructure. Operations people need to understand code. People need to fucking work with each other and not just occupy space next to each other."
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2013/06/04/devops-the-title-match/
Very good points, and as the author here (http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2014/06/14/paas-for-realists/) points out:
> I should state up front that I disagree with quite a few bits of the 12 Factor model. It’s important to remember that, imho, the 12 Factor model was designed as a business strategy for Heroku. The steps follow exactly what makes an app work best on Heroku, not what is best for an application.
Here's a dump of blogs I follow that have lots of devops-oriented contents.
http://www.kartar.net/
http://www.kitchensoap.com/
http://www.masterzen.fr/
http://blog.nistu.de/
http://www.jedi.be/blog/
http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/
http://www.unixdaemon.net/
http://www.rottenbytes.info/
http://blog.lusis.org/
http://bitfieldconsulting.com/
http://agilesysadmin.net/
It's not so much what I consider to be missing as what others don't seem to be finding in them that encourages them to bolt on functionality into "incompatible" tools:
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2011/08/22/the-configuration-management-divide/
You should read this as an example why many software vendors don't bother with trying to get their packages into distributions' package repositories.
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2012/03/16/why-you-should-stop-fighting-distro-vendors/