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Announcing Flower 1.9

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Charles Beauville
Machine Learning Engineer at Flower Labs

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The Flower Team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.9 stable and it's packed with updates! Flower is a friendly framework for collaborative AI and data science. It makes novel approaches such as federated learning, federated evaluation, federated analytics, and fleet learning accessible to a wide audience of researchers and engineers.

Thanks to our contributors

We would like to give our special thanks to all the contributors who made the new version of Flower possible (in git shortlog order):

Adam Narozniak, Charles Beauville, Chong Shen Ng, Daniel J. Beutel, Daniel Nata Nugraha, Heng Pan, Javier, Mahdi Beitollahi, Robert Steiner, Taner Topal, Yan Gao, bapic, mohammadnaseri

What's new?

Deprecations

  • Deprecate Python 3.8 support

    Python 3.8 will stop receiving security fixes in October 2024. Support for Python 3.8 is now deprecated and will be removed in an upcoming release.

  • Deprecate (experimental) flower-driver-api and flower-fleet-api (#3416, #3420)

    Flower 1.9 deprecates the two (experimental) commands flower-driver-api and flower-fleet-api. Both commands will be removed in an upcoming release. Use flower-superlink instead.

  • Deprecate --server in favor of --superlink (#3518)

    The commands flower-server-app and flower-client-app should use --superlink instead of the now deprecated --server. Support for --server will be removed in a future release.

Incompatible changes

  • Replace flower-superlink CLI option --certificates with --ssl-ca-certfile , --ssl-certfile and --ssl-keyfile (#3512, #3408)

    SSL-related flower-superlink CLI arguments were restructured in an incompatible way. Instead of passing a single --certificates flag with three values, you now need to pass three flags (--ssl-ca-certfile, --ssl-certfile and --ssl-keyfile) with one value each. Check out the SSL connections documentation page for details.

  • Remove SuperLink --vce option (#3513)

    Instead of separately starting a SuperLink and a ServerApp for simulation, simulations must now be started using the single flower-simulation command.

  • Merge --grpc-rere and --rest SuperLink options (#3527)

    To simplify the usage of flower-superlink, previously separate sets of CLI options for gRPC and REST were merged into one unified set of options. Consult the Flower CLI reference documentation for details.


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