When you have kids, May is the busiest month of all. Every extracurricular activity has some kind of end-of-year program to deal with. School is full of testing and little parties. As my wife is a teacher, she gets to have all her end-of-school stuff going on, too. Work is crazy this month for me, too, as I’m heading to Madison next week for a big trip.

Work wise, I’m actively moving our Azure VMs from the old service management platform over to Resource Manager (ARM). The transition has been smooth so far. I’ve created t-shirt sized templates for the machines I’ve moved over, and all of them are built essentially the same. Once built, I’m trying to automate any of the stuff I need to put on them as much as possible, then documenting the rest with screenshots. It’s not the ideal scenario for me, but I just have too many pet servers that can’t be fully provisioned without a little hand-holding. It will be nice to have everything documented, though.

One thing I really want to figure out is how to best document what happens to my Chef nodes when the client runs. They obviously pull down whatever recipes or roles are assigned and then run whatever, but a single document for each server, showing the recipes applied and maybe a drill-down to the contents of the recipe would be really cool. It wouldn’t even need to be printed, as long as it’s exportable to PDF for a big-ass report if someone wanted it. Maybe I’ll nag some friends at Chef for such a thing.