fdere

Fdere is a federated data exchange and remote execution framework designed to enable privacy-preserving collaboration across distributed computer systems. It provides a common protocol, a lightweight runtime, and language bindings that allow edge devices and central services to share data and execute tasks without exposing raw data. The project originated with the FDERE Consortium in 2019, aiming to unify federation, streaming processing, and distributed computation within a single platform.

Fdere comprises three main layers: a secure exchange protocol, a runtime that schedules and executes tasks across nodes, and software development kits for languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Go. It employs a publish-subscribe messaging overlay for communication, end-to-end encryption, and policy-based access control. The runtime supports both streaming and batch workloads, with fault tolerance provided by task lineage and checkpointing. The architecture is designed to operate across heterogeneous environments, including on-premises data centers and edge devices, with NAT traversal supported by relay nodes and authenticated tunnels.

Key features include privacy-preserving data sharing via privacy-enhancing techniques and optional secure multi-party computation extensions, modular pluggable backends, and support for streaming ingestion, low-latency execution, and scalable deployment. System reliability is addressed through backpressure-aware queuing and automatic retry mechanisms.

Fdere has seen adoption in several pilot projects focusing on healthcare data collaboration and smart-city analytics. It is often compared with MQTT, Apache Kafka, and other edge-oriented frameworks, but aims to offer federated computation alongside data sharing. Critics point to maturity, ecosystem size, and interoperability as ongoing considerations.

See also: federated learning, edge computing, data exchange protocols, privacy-preserving computation.