Applying DevOps best practices and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to your FME Flow deployment brings automation, repeatability, and control to the process. By defining infrastructure, configurations, and workflows as code, teams can deploy faster, upgrade more safely, and maintain consistent environments across development, testing, and production.
For a technical deep dive into this topic, watch our webinar, Automation in Action: Accelerating Your FME Flow Deployment with CI/CD, where our team demos how to use Jenkins as the central point of integration to connect all components of the pipeline. Read on for a quick overview of the tips discussed in the webinar.
1. Treat Your Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code allows you to define your systems in reusable templates rather than configuring servers manually. Using tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, or Google Cloud Deployment Manager, you can describe every part of your environment, from compute resources to networking, in files that live alongside your application code.
For FME Flow, this approach turns deployment into a predictable process. You can rebuild environments on demand, recover from failures quickly, and ensure configurations remain identical across all stages. Storing these definitions in version control systems such as GitHub or GitLab makes collaboration easier and provides an audit trail of every infrastructure change. In short, your infrastructure becomes transparent, testable, and consistent.
2. Automate for Fault Tolerance and Repeatability
Automation is central to fault-tolerant deployment. When you define setup and configuration steps in code, you eliminate the risk of human error and make it possible to replicate environments exactly. For example, a well-designed CI/CD pipeline might use Terraform to create infrastructure, while GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps automatically trigger builds and deployments when code changes are merged.
This setup accelerates delivery and keeps deployments self-documenting, so anyone can see how an environment is built by reviewing the code. With automation handling provisioning, scaling, and validation, your teams spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time delivering value.
3. Simplify Upgrades and Version Management
Upgrading FME Flow can be one of the most time-consuming tasks for administrators, but IaC and CI/CD can simplify the process dramatically. Rather than upgrading an existing instance directly, you can deploy a parallel environment with the new version using your existing templates, migrate configurations, and test everything before switching over. If issues arise, rolling back is as simple as redeploying the previous configuration.
This controlled, code-driven approach reduces downtime and risk, while making upgrades repeatable across all environments.
4. Confidently Migrate FME Objects Between Environments
Managing FME repositories, connections, and schedules manually often leads to subtle inconsistencies between environments. By automating migrations through FME REST API calls or scripted deployment steps, you can promote FME objects between development, staging, and production with confidence. Integrating these scripts into your CI/CD pipeline ensures migrations happen in sync with infrastructure updates, maintaining alignment across environments and reducing the chance of configuration drift.
5. Adopt CI/CD for Scalability and Reliability
CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) is a software development practice that aims to accelerate the overall software development lifecycle. Implementing CI/CD workflows with FME helps automate and simplify your deployment by bringing modern software delivery principles to FME Flow. Every change, whether it’s an infrastructure update or a new workspace, is tested, validated, and deployed automatically. A typical pipeline commits changes to a version-controlled repository, validates infrastructure definitions, packages and tests FME components, and then deploys them to the target environment.
Paired with cloud-native monitoring solutions such as AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud Operations Suite, CI/CD pipelines ensure your environments are reliable, scalable, and always up to date. They turn deployment into a routine, low-risk process instead of a disruptive event.
6. Follow Best Practices for Sustainable DevOps Adoption
To make these practices sustainable, focus on modularity and documentation. Break your IaC templates into reusable components, parameterize them for different environments, and store sensitive information in secure variables or secret managers. Automate testing for both infrastructure and FME workspaces to catch errors early, and clearly document each stage of your deployment process so that new team members can onboard quickly.
By investing in these fundamentals, you establish a foundation that scales with your organization’s needs and supports ongoing improvements to performance, resilience, and cost efficiency.
Conclusion
Adopting DevOps and Infrastructure as Code for FME Flow transforms how you deploy and manage your environments. Tools like Jenkins, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and cloud-native monitoring platforms bring automation and consistency to what was previously manual and error-prone work. The result is faster deployment, safer upgrades, and greater reliability, no matter where or how you run FME Flow.
