Announcing Flower 1.23

The Flower team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.23 stable, packed with new 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 Tupper, Alan Yi, Alireza Ghasemi, Charles Beauville, Chong Shen Ng, Daniel Anoruo, Daniel J. Beutel, Daniel Nata Nugraha, Heng Pan, Javier, Patrick Foley, Robert Steiner, Rohat Bozyil, Yan Gao, combe4259, han97901, maviva

What's new?

• Enable dynamic SuperNode management via Flower CLI (#5953, #5954, #5955, #5962, #5968, #5974, #5977, #5980, #5981, #5985, #5986, #5987, #5988, #5991, #5998, #6003, #6004, #6006, #6009, #6023, #6028, #6029, #6037, #6064, #6070)

  Revamps SuperNode authentication and introduce dynamic SuperNode management through the Flower CLI. Users can now register, list, and unregister SuperNodes directly via commands, such as flwr supernode register which adds a SuperNode's public key to the SuperLink whitelist. SuperNodes can then be launched using the corresponding private key. See the SuperNode authentication guide for full details.

• Add migration guide for OpenFL to Flower (#5975)

  Adds a migration guide to support OpenFL users as the project approaches archival. The guide explains how to transition existing OpenFL setups to Flower, providing step-by-step migration instructions.

• Add quantum federated learning example with PennyLane (#5852)

  Introduces a new example demonstrating quantum federated learning using PennyLane. This example showcases how Flower can be integrated with quantum machine learning workflows—Flower is going quantum!

• Replace flwr ls with flwr list (keep alias for compatibility) (#5973)

  The old flwr ls command remains available as an alias.

• Migrate examples and tutorials to Message API (#5950, #5957, #5963, #5966)

  Migrates the remaining examples and tutorials, including the 30-minute Flower tutorial, whisper, quickstart-pandas, and federated-kaplan-meier-fitter, to the new Message API for improved consistency and maintainability.

• Refactor SuperNode lifecycle (#6051, #6052, #6060, #6061, #6063, #6069, #6073)

  Refactors the SuperNode lifecycle to align with the new management flow, streamlining SuperNode registration, activation, deactivation, and unregistration.

• Add deployment guide for multi-cluster OpenShift setups (#6001)

• Introduce file-based ObjectStore (#6040, #6036, #6008, #6042)

• Improve documentation (#5936, #5937, #5943, #5949, #5956, #5958, #5972, #5976, #5983, #5996, #5999, #6010, #6018, #6030)

• Update dependencies and CI (#5932, #5941, #5944, #5964, #6014, #6020, #6021, #6022, #6024, #6026, #6032, #6035, #6055, #6065)

• Bugfix (#5979)

• General improvements (#5773, #5938, #5939, #5942, #5948, #5951, #5959, #5984, #5989, #5992, #6007, #6011, #6033, #6038, #6041, #6046, #6047, #6048, #6050, #6054, #6057, #6058, #6074, #6075)

  As always, many parts of the Flower framework and quality infrastructure were improved and updated.

Incompatible changes

• Remove CSV-based SuperNode authentication (#5997)

  Deprecates the legacy CSV-based SuperNode authentication mechanism in favor of the new dynamic SuperNode management system. The --auth-list-public-keys flag is no longer supported, as SuperNode whitelisting is now handled through the Flower CLI. Please refer to the Node Authentication documentation to learn how to use the new mechanism.

• Rename user authentication to account authentication (#5965, #5969)

  Renames "user authentication" to "account authentication" across the framework for improved clarity and consistency. This change also updates the YAML key from auth_type to authn_type to align with authz_type.

• Deprecate --auth-supernode-public-key flag (#6002, #6076)

  The --auth-supernode-public-key flag in flower-supernode is deprecated and no longer in use. The public key is now automatically derived from the --auth-supernode-private-key, simplifying configuration and reducing redundancy.