ArcGIS Enterprise supports various ways to publish content to use in your maps and apps. The two primary ways of publishing content are using one of the two desktop applications—ArcGIS Pro or ArcMap—or using the ArcGIS Enterprise portal.
Authoring maps and other layers with ArcGIS Pro provides a full user experience and set of options for visualization.
When you publish, you can copy the data to ArcGIS Enterprise—which results in hosted layers and data managed by ArcGIS—or you can reference data in its original location. The latter option is referred to as user-managed data. To reference data in place, you must first register the data store with ArcGIS Enterprise. Supported data stores include folders on file shares, relational databases, and cloud storage locations.
To register a data store with individual ArcGIS Server sites in an ArcGIS Enterprise deployment, use ArcGIS Server Manager. Data stores registered in this manner are available for all publishers with access to the data source location and the ArcGIS Server site. This is the primary workflow that supports content published by reference from ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Desktop. This option is also used for other, nonpublishing workflows such as defining big data file shares and raster stores.
In ArcGIS Server Manager, you can also define a location to store map or image service caches. Caches for all map and image services published to the ArcGIS Server site are stored in the file or cloud storage location you define.