Automate Your FME Server Installs, Take a 5-minute Coffee Break

Development, testing, and production environments are commonplace in today's technology stacks. These structures ensure that proper testing and quality control are performed for workbenches, scripts, and logic in the final product. Whilst some clients and environments may be able to have this tiered infrastructure managed through separate repositories on one FME Server, this is not always the case.

Recently, a project has needed the setup of FME Servers across five environments. In addition, the Azure virtual machines that FME Server are installed on need to be able to be re-imaged through scripts as part of the client's disaster recovery policies. Therefore, the solution to this problem was to write an installation script that coupled with environment specific variables stored in Azure Key Vault, ensures a hands-off, repeatable process to deploy FME Server to a new machine.

This script not only ran the FME Server installer, but also configured the database, and ran through numerus post install configuration steps. Subsequently, this script has been adapted to other clients and has been instrumental in supplying rapid deployments of new FME Server versions. This has allowed us to ensure that deployments of FME Server across multiple environments is consistent with the client's requirements.