Introduction

What is vantage6?

Vantage6 stands for privacy preserving federated learning infrastructure for secure insight exchange.

The project is inspired by the Personal Health Train (PHT) concept. In this analogy vantage6 is the tracks and stations. Compatible algorithms are the trains, and computation tasks are the journey. Vantage6 is completely open source under the Apache License.

What vantage6 does:

• delivering algorithms to data stations and collecting their results

• managing users, organizations, collaborations, computation tasks and their results

• providing control (security) at the data-stations to their owners

What vantage6 does not (yet) do:

• formatting the data at the data station

• aligning data across the data stations (for the vertical partitioned use case)

The vantage6 infrastructure is designed with three fundamental functional aspects of federated learning.

1. Autonomy. All involved parties should remain independent and autonomous.

2. Heterogeneity. Parties should be allowed to have differences in hardware and operating systems.

3. Flexibility. Related to the latter, a federated learning infrastructure should not limit the use of relevant data.

Overview of this documentation

This documentation space consists of the following main sections:

• Introduction → You are here now

• User guide → How to use vantage6 as a researcher

• Node admin guide → How to install and configure vantage6 nodes

• Server admin guide → How to configure and deploy vantage6 servers

• Technical Docs (Under construction) → Implementation details of the vantage6 platform

• Developer community → How to collaborate on the development of the vantage6 infrastructure

• Algorithm Development → Develop algorithms that are compatible with vantage6

• Glossary → A dictionary of common terms used in these docs

• Release notes → Log of what has been released and when

Vantage6 resources

This is a - non-exhaustive - list of vantage6 resources.

Documentation

• docs.vantage6.ai → This documentation.

• vantage6.ai → vantage6 project website

• Academic papers → Technical insights into vantage6

Source code

• vantage6 → Contains all components (and the python-client).

• Planning → Contains all features, bugfixes and feature requests we are working on. To submit one yourself, you can create a new issue.

Community

• Discord → Chat with the vantage6 community

• Community meetings → Bi-monthly developer community meeting

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Index

• Introduction
• Concepts
  • Architecture
  • Entities
  • Network Actors
    • Server
    • Data Station
    • User or Application
  • End to end encryption

• 1. User guide
  • 1.1. User interface
  • 1.2. Python client
    • 1.2.1. Requirements
    • 1.2.2. Install
    • 1.2.3. Use
      • Overview
      • Authentication
      • Creating an organization
      • Creating a collaboration
      • Registering a node
      • Creating a task
  • 1.3. R client
    • 1.3.1. Install
    • 1.3.2. Use
      • Example
  • 1.4. API
• 2. Node admin guide
  • 2.1. Requirements
    • 2.1.1. Python
    • 2.1.2. Docker
  • 2.2. Install
  • 2.3. Use
    • 2.3.1. Quick start
    • 2.3.2. Available commands
      • Local test setup
  • 2.4. Configure
    • 2.4.1. How to create a configuration file
    • 2.4.2. Where is my configuration file?
    • 2.4.3. All configuration options
    • 2.4.4. Configuration file location
    • 2.4.5. Security
    • 2.4.6. Logging
• 3. Server admin guide
  • 3.1. Requirements
    • 3.1.1. Python
    • 3.1.2. Docker
  • 3.2. Install
    • 3.2.1. Local (test) Installation
    • 3.2.2. Host your server
  • 3.3. Deploy
    • 3.3.1. NGINX
    • 3.3.2. Azure app service
  • 3.4. Install optional components
    • 3.4.1. User Interface
    • 3.4.2. EduVPN
    • 3.4.3. RabbitMQ
    • 3.4.4. Docker registry
      • Docker Hub
      • Harbor
    • 3.4.5. SMTP server
  • 3.5. Use
    • 3.5.1. Quick start
    • 3.5.2. Available commands
    • 3.5.3. Local test setup
    • 3.5.4. Batch import
  • 3.6. Configure
    • 3.6.1. How to create a configuration file
    • 3.6.2. Where is my configuration file?
    • 3.6.3. All configuration options
    • 3.6.4. Configuration file location
    • 3.6.5. Logging
  • 3.7. Shell
    • 3.7.1. Organizations
    • 3.7.2. Roles and Rules
    • 3.7.3. Users
    • 3.7.4. Collaborations
    • 3.7.5. Nodes
    • 3.7.6. Tasks and Results
• 4. Algorithm Development
  • 4.1. Concepts
    • 4.1.1. Input & output
      • Environment variables
      • File mounts
    • 4.1.2. Wrappers
      • Federated function
      • Central function
      • Different wrappers
      • Data serialization
    • 4.1.3. Mock client
    • 4.1.4. Child containers
    • 4.1.5. Networking
      • VPN connection
    • 4.1.6. Cross language
    • 4.1.7. Package & distribute
      • Dockerfile
      • Build & upload
      • Signed images
  • 4.2. Classic Tutorial
    • 4.2.1. Mathematical decomposition
    • 4.2.2. Federated implementation
      • Federated part
      • Central part
      • Local testing
    • 4.2.3. Vantage6 integration
      • 📂Algorithm Structure
      • Local testing
      • Building and Distributing
    • 4.2.4. Cross-language serialization
• 5. Technical Docs
  • 5.1. Architecture
    • 5.1.1. Network Actors
      • Server
      • Data Station
      • User or Application
    • 5.1.2. Components
      • vantage6-server
      • vantage6-node
      • vantage6-clients
      • vantage6-UI
    • 5.1.3. Architecture
  • 5.2. Features
    • 5.2.1. Server features
      • Two-factor authentication
      • SSH Tunnel
      • Horizontal scaling
      • Permission management
      • API response structure
    • 5.2.2. Node features
    • 5.2.3. Algorithm features
      • Algorithm wrappers
    • 5.2.4. Communication between components
      • SocketIO connection
      • Algorithm-to-algorithm comunication
  • 5.3. Node
    • 5.3.1. Node class
    • 5.3.2. NodeContext class
      • NodeContext
    • 5.3.3. DockerNodeContext class
    • 5.3.4. DockerBaseManager class
    • 5.3.5. DockerManager class
    • 5.3.6. DockerTaskManager class
    • 5.3.7. VPNManager class
    • 5.3.8. Algorithm execution exceptions
    • 5.3.9. Proxy server
    • 5.3.10. vnode-local commands
  • 5.4. Server
    • 5.4.1. Main server class
      • ServerApp
    • 5.4.2. Starting the server
      • run_server()
      • run_dev_server()
    • 5.4.3. Permission management
      • Scope
      • Operation
      • RuleCollection
      • PermissionManager
    • 5.4.4. Socket functionality
      • DefaultSocketNamespace
    • 5.4.5. API endpoints
    • 5.4.6. SQLAlchemy models
      • Helper (base) classes
      • Database models for the API resources
    • 5.4.7. Mail service
      • MailService
    • 5.4.8. Default roles
      • get_default_roles()
• 6. Developer community
  • 6.1. Contribute
    • 6.1.1. Support questions
    • 6.1.2. Reporting issues
    • 6.1.3. Security vulnerabilities
    • 6.1.4. Community Meetings
    • 6.1.5. Submitting patches
      • Setup your environment
      • Coding
      • Local test setup
      • Unit tests & coverage
      • Pull Request
      • Documentation
  • 6.2. Documentation
    • 6.2.1. How this documentation is created
    • 6.2.2. API Documenation with OAS3+
  • 6.3. Release
    • 6.3.1. Version format
    • 6.3.2. Create a release
    • 6.3.3. The release pipeline
    • 6.3.4. Distribute release
    • 6.3.5. User Interface release
• 7. Glossary

• Release notes
  • 3.8.2
  • 3.8.1
  • 3.8.0
  • 3.7.3
  • 3.7.2
  • 3.7.1
  • 3.7.0
  • 3.6.1
  • 3.5.2
  • 3.5.1
  • 3.5.0
  • 3.4.2
  • 3.4.0 & 3.4.1
  • 3.3.7
  • 3.3.6
  • 3.3.5
  • 3.3.3
  • 3.3.2
  • 3.3.1
  • 3.3.0
  • 3.2.0
  • 3.1.0
  • 3.0.0
  • 2.3.0 - 2.3.4
  • 2.2.0
  • 2.1.2 & 2.1.3
  • 2.1.1
  • 2.1.0
  • 2.0.0.post1
  • 2.0.0
  • 1.2.3
  • 1.2.2
  • 1.2.1
  • 1.2.0
  • 1.1.0
  • 1.0.0
• Partners