Automated upgrades for Flow Hosted

Hi ​@philipv , thanks for the idea and for articulating the distinction between "automated" and "automatic" — that's a helpful framing.

You're right that Safe Software handles the initial installation of Flow Hosted, but upgrades are currently the customer's responsibility. Part of the reason we haven't been able to close that gap is rooted in how Flow's security model works: by design, we (FME Flow Hosted team) don't have visibility into the details of a customer's Flow installation (databases, configurations, etc.). That means we can't access your instance to automate the data migration steps that are part of an upgrade — and frankly, that's a boundary we think is important to maintain.

That said, we (FME Flow development teams) are in the very early stages of engineering work aimed at making minor version upgrades (eg. 2026.1.0 to 2026.1.1) easier for Flow overall. It's too early to share a timeline, but if and when that work matures, it may open the door to facilitating more of that upgrade process within Flow Hosted specifically.

Is the upgrade process (and the data migration involved) specifically what you're hoping to see made easier? Or is there another aspect of the upgrade experience that's the bigger pain point for you? Would love to make sure we're solving the right problem.

In general, when we are looking at SaaS (or in this case iPaaS) solutions, we are looking to outsource as much of the maintenance as possible. Upgrades are often the biggest component of maintenance.