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May Community Conversation

This meeting was held on Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 11:30am ET / 10:30am CT / 8:30am PT / 3:30pm GMT. Monthly community meetings are convened over Zoom to discuss topics of interest. Community members are encouraged to bring questions and ideas to share.

Meeting recording

Quick recap

The ColdFront Community Conversation in May 2026 was led by Dori Sajdak, focusing on gathering feedback from community members about their experiences and needs. The meeting included a mentee poll covering topics like expertise areas, wins achieved with ColdFront, current challenges, and desired investments in the product. Key insights revealed that community members wear multiple hats, with expertise spanning allocations, billing, Python programming, HPC monitoring, and user accounts. A significant win shared by John was maintaining consistent service levels during a system admin shortage. The discussion highlighted that maintaining integrations and user/staff training are top time-consuming activities, while manual approvals have been reduced through ColdFront's implementation. Florian from Heidelberg University in Germany shared plans to customize ColdFront and expressed interest in contributing these customizations back to the community, leading to a discussion about ColdFront's upcoming version 2.0 development, which will include a plugin framework to make extensions easier. The conversation ended with updates about the upcoming ColdFront 1.8 release, which includes Django 5.2 upgrades and other improvements, and a brief discussion about the Slurm REST plugin development.

Next steps

  • Florian: Get in touch with Andrew (and/or core developers) to arrange a small meeting to discuss and pre-share customizations and integration approaches for ColdFront, with the possibility of a future presentation to the group.
  • Andrew: Send Florian an invite to the core working group focused on ColdFront version 2 development.
  • Florian: Join the ColdFront Slack channel to connect with the community and core development team.
  • Sajid: Reach out to Claire (and Andrew) regarding questions and collaboration on the ColdFront Slurm REST plugin, including discussion of issues and potential updates.
  • Andrew, Claire, Raminder, Sajid: Collaborate on updating the ColdFront Slurm REST plugin, including migration to Uvicorn and addressing existing issues, with Sajid providing feedback from the dev instance.
  • Dori: Start a documentation working group for ColdFront (stated as a planned action, not yet started).
  • Andrew: Release ColdFront 1.8 to PyPI in the next couple of days.

Summary

ColdFront Community Conversation Insights

Dori Sajdak, the ColdFront Community Manager, hosted the May 2026 ColdFront Community Conversation and conducted a mentee poll to gather insights from participants. The discussion covered participants' roles and expertise, with responses indicating that many wear multiple hats and are often sought after for various technical skills including allocations, billing, Python programming, HPC monitoring, user accounts, storage management, and Gen AI applications. John shared a significant win where ColdFront helped his team maintain consistent service levels for a year after losing a system administrator. The conversation was still in its early stages, with Dori planning to explore additional questions about participants' experiences and motivations with ColdFront.

ColdFront Feedback and Improvement Priorities

The meeting focused on gathering feedback from participants about ColdFront's functionality and community support. Participants ranked their top challenges, with maintaining integrations and user training emerging as key areas needing attention. When asked about desired investments, participants expressed interest in real-world examples, peer collaboration, and improved documentation. The discussion revealed that over 50% of participants felt adequately supported by the product and documentation, though there was room for improvement. Participants also expressed interest in shaping ColdFront's future and contributing to the community, with specific interest in small, clearly scoped tasks and templates or examples.

ColdFront Customization Plans Discussion

Florian from Heidelberg University in Germany introduced their plans to roll out ColdFront and discussed customizations they are developing to address specific needs. Dori expressed strong interest in seeing these customizations, noting that while many organizations believe their modifications are specific to their use case, there are often broader issues that could benefit the community. Dori suggested two options for sharing the work: presenting it in a future meeting or submitting the customization as a pull request or sharing the repository.

ColdFront Development and Plugins

The team discussed the current state of ColdFront development and future plans. Florian raised concerns about plugin integration and customization challenges with the current version, leading to a discussion about ColdFront 2.0 development, which will include a more robust plugin framework. Andrew announced that ColdFront 1.8 with Django 5.2 upgrade would be released within the next day or two. The group also discussed the Slurm REST plugin, with Sajid opening issues about upgrading from setup tools to UVAD, and Andrew expressing interest in helping with the migration and integration with ColdFront 2.0.