What you can publish to federated ArcGIS Server sites from ArcGIS Pro

To publish layers from ArcGIS Pro that reference your source data, you must register the folder, database, or enterprise geodatabase that contains the data with the federated server. You can register the data source in ArcGIS Pro. When you publish from ArcGIS Pro, you publish to one of the federated servers with which you registered your data source.

What you can publish to a federated server depends on the type of data present in the map from which you publish.

If you publish vector data from a folder, database, or geodatabase that is registered with your federated server, you can publish a map image layer and layers associated with the map image layer as follows:

• If you choose only the Map Image option, publishing creates a map service on the federated server and a map image layer item on your portal.
• If you choose both the Map Image and Feature options, publishing creates a map service with feature access capabilities enabled on the federated server and creates a map image layer item and feature layer item on your ArcGIS Enterprise portal.
• If you choose both the Map Image and WMS options, publishing creates a map service with the WMS capability enabled on the federated server and creates a map image layer item and WMS item on your portal.

If you publish raster data from a folder, database, or geodatabase that is registered with your federated server (ArcGIS Image Server), you can publish an imagery layer and layers associated with the imagery layer as follows:

• If you choose only the Imagery option, publishing creates an image service on the federated server and an imagery layer item on your portal.
• If you choose both the Imagery and WMS options, publishing creates an image service on the federated server with the WMS capability enabled and creates an imagery layer and WMS layer items on your portal.
• If you choose both the Imagery and WCS options, publishing creates an image service on the federated server with the WCS capability enabled. Only an imagery layer is created on the portal, though; there is no corresponding WCS item in the portal.

You have the option to cache your map image or imagery layers when publishing to one of your portal's federated servers.

If you publish a utility network from an enterprise geodatabase that is registered with your federated server, publish a map image layer and feature layer to have access to the utility network in the resultant layer. If you want to edit the feature layer, you must also enable the Version Management capability. When all these options are checked, publishing creates a map service with feature access, version management, utility network, and network diagram capabilities enabled on the federated server. Map image layer and feature layer items are created on the portal.

You can also publish a Tool or Locator to a federated server from ArcGIS Pro. See Share with ArcGIS Pro in the ArcGIS Pro help for details.

Imagery layers that run on federated sites

If you have image data in a registered folder or cloud data store, you can create imagery layers from the Contents page in your ArcGIS Enterprise portal. When you publish from the data store, the image data stays in the source location. This saves time when publishing because the data does not have to be copied to a federated ArcGIS Image Server. It also saves on duplicating storage space for the same data. An imagery layer item is added to the portal and the underlying image service runs on the federated ArcGIS Image Server.

The option to create an imagery layer is available if the portal administrator configured a raster analysis or image hosting server for the portal.

Item and service dependencies

When you publish a map image or imagery layer and any of their dependent layers (feature or WMS), the map or image service is created in a folder you specify on the federated server, and it uses data in your registered data store. This is different than when you publish a feature layer, vector tile layer, tile layer, or scene layer from ArcGIS Pro. Publishing any of these results in a hosted web layer, the data is always copied from the data source, and the service is created in the Hosted folder on your hosting server. In the case of these hosted web layers, you can delete the items from your portal if you no longer need them, and this deletes the services and data from the hosting server.

If you no longer need a map image layer, imagery layer, WMS item, or feature layer, you can also delete the item from your portal, and the associated services will also be deleted. Any portal items that were created as copies, however, will remain on the portal and will be orphaned from their associated services.

For more information on item and service dependencies, see Relationships between web services and portal items.