For the article “Using FME Flow with Esri ArcGIS Software” at https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407403131917-Using-FME-Flow-with-Esri-ArcGIS-Software, it would be helpful to know whether users who install ArcGIS Server on the server with FME Flow can turn off the ArcGIS Server service without interfering with the FME Flow services running on the server. Turning off the ArcGIS Server service if it is not being used by FME Flow would improve our security posture by reducing the surface area for attacks when the ArcGIS Server service is disabled on the machine.
Question
ArcGIS Server service clarification on "Using FME Flow with Esri ArcGIS Software" article
+15- Safer
Thanks for sharing this question. In short, at least in my testing, it has been fine to turn off the ArcGIS Server service. FME Flow engines are still able to get the necessary license and use the Esri ArcPy interpreter when necessary. We would stipulate that you do formal testing to cover all your use cases and any future use cases you might wish to deploy to FME Flow that could have dependency on ArcGIS Server.
We can take a look at adding that to the article.
On a bit of a tangent, there is one caution I will add here… we have seen issues with JVMs (FME Flow’s and ArcGIS Server). An example is when working with Snowflake (JDBC) and SDE Geodatabase in FME Workspace. This can lead to a situation where the wrong JVM (java virtual machine) is loaded and will cause a fatal error in the workspace. Some testing has shown that shutting down ArcGIS Server helps… while other times the FME Workspaces has to be separated to avoid the fatal error.
Not all environments will exhibit the issues. Sometimes the issue starts to show up after running fine for months. Possibly related to System or Software updates.
This has been a challenging problem to reproduce and thus we don’t know the cause - other than down to the ordering of operations in the workspace causing certain libraries to be loaded first, or perhaps the PATH order and how libraries are discovered. Rest assure we are looking at this and investigation continues.