Local development and deployment

Note

These instructions are for users wanting to set up a local development deployment of FEDn (i.e. without FEDn Studio). This requires practical knowledge of Docker and docker-compose.

Running the FEDn development sandbox (docker-compose)

During development on FEDn, and when working on own aggregators/helpers, it is useful to have a local development setup of the core FEDn services (controller, combiner, database, object store). For this, we provide Dockerfiles and docker-compose template.

To start a development sandbox for FEDn using docker-compose:

docker compose \
 -f ../../docker-compose.yaml \
 -f docker-compose.override.yaml \
 up

This starts up local services for MongoDB, Minio, the API Server, one Combiner and two clients. You can verify the deployment using these urls:

This setup does not include the security features of Studio, and thus will not require authentication of clients. To use the APIClient to test a compute package and seed model against a local FEDn deployment:

from fedn import APIClient
client = APIClient(host="localhost", port=8092)
client.set_active_package("package.tgz", helper="numpyhelper")
client.set_active_model("seed.npz")

To connect a native FEDn client, you need to make sure that the combiner service can be resolved using the name “combiner”. One way to achieve this is to edit your ‘/etc/hosts’ and add a line ‘127.0.0.1 combiner’.

Access message logs and validation data from MongoDB

You can access and download event logs and validation data via the API, and you can also as a developer obtain the MongoDB backend data using pymongo or via the MongoExpress interface:

Username and password are found in ‘docker-compose.yaml’.

Access global models

You can obtain global model updates from the ‘fedn-models’ bucket in Minio:

Username and password are found in ‘docker-compose.yaml’.

Reset the FEDn deployment

To purge all data from a deployment incuding all session and round data, access the MongoExpress UI interface and delete the entire fedn-network collection. Then restart all services.

Clean up

You can clean up by running

docker-compose -f ../../docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose.override.yaml down -v

Connecting clients using Docker:

For convenience, we distribute a Docker image hosted on ghrc.io with FEDn preinstalled. For example, to start a client for the MNIST PyTorch example using Docker and FEDN 0.10.0, run this from the example folder:

docker run \
  -v $PWD/client.yaml:/app/client.yaml \
  -e FEDN_PACKAGE_EXTRACT_DIR=package \
  -e FEDN_NUM_DATA_SPLITS=2 \
  -e FEDN_DATA_PATH=/app/package/data/clients/1/mnist.pt \
  ghcr.io/scaleoutsystems/fedn/fedn:0.10.0 run client -in client.yaml --force-ssl --secure=True

Self-managed distributed deployment

You can use different hosts for the various FEDn services. These instructions shows how to set up FEDn on a local network using a single workstation or laptop as the host for the servier-side components, and other hosts or devices as clients.

Note

For a secure and production-grade deployment solution over public networks, explore the FEDn Studio service at fedn.scaleoutsystems.com.

Alternatively follow this tutorial substituting the hosts local IP with your public IP, open the neccesary ports (see which ports are used in docker-compose.yaml), and ensure you have taken additional neccesary security precautions.

Prerequisites - One host workstation and atleast one client device - Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11 - Docker - Docker Compose

Launch a distributed FEDn Network

Start by noting your host’s local IP address, used within your network. Discover it by running ifconfig on UNIX or ipconfig on Windows, typically listed under inet for Unix and IPv4 for Windows.

Continue by following the standard procedure to initiate a FEDn network, for example using the provided docker-compose template. Once the network is active, upload your compute package and seed (for comprehensive details, see the quickstart tutorials).

Note

This guide covers general local networks where server and client may be on different hosts but able to communicate on their private IPs. A common scenario is also to run fedn and the clients on localhost on a single machine. In that case, you can replace <host local ip> by “127.0.0.1” below.

Configuring and Attaching Clients

On your client device, continue with initializing your client. To connect to the host machine we need to ensure we are routing the correct DNS to our hosts local IP address. We can do this using the standard FEDn client.yaml:

network_id: fedn-network
discover_host: api-server
discover_port: 8092

We can then run a client using docker by adding the hostname:ip mapping in the docker run command:

docker run \
-v $PWD/client.yaml:<client.yaml file location> \
<potentiel data pointers>
—add-host=api-server:<host local ip> \
—add-host=combiner:<host local ip> \
<image name> run client -in client.yaml --name client1

Alternatively updating the /etc/hosts file, appending the following lines for running naitively:

<host local ip>      api-server
<host local ip>      combiner