The federation process links an ArcGIS Server site with your ArcGIS Enterprise portal, automatically sharing the server site's content with ArcGIS Enterprise and giving the portal control over the security and sharing settings of the server site.
In ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes, the federation process is optional and allows you to connect stand-alone ArcGIS GIS Server or ArcGIS Image Server sites running on Windows or Linux machines and work with their services in your portal.
Dive-in:
ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes has its own services architecture based on Kubernetes pods and includes a hosting server. Once you've deployed ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes, you can immediately begin publishing services, creating hosted layers, and running analysis workflows in Map Viewer.
Services that exist on the ArcGIS Server site at the time of federation are automatically added to the portal as items, as are all services that are published to the server site in the future. These items are owned by the portal administrator who performs federation. After federation, the administrator can reassign ownership of these items to existing members. Any subsequent items you publish to the federated server are automatically added as items and are owned by the user who publishes them.
When you federate a server with your portal, the portal's security store controls all access to the server. This provides a convenient sign-in experience but also impacts how you access and administer the federated server. For example, when you federate a server, all users, roles, and permissions that you previously configured on ArcGIS Server services are no longer valid. Access to services is instead determined by portal members, roles, and sharing permissions.
Note:
At this release of ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes, only ArcGIS GIS Server and ArcGIS Image Server sites can be federated. ArcGIS Server sites licensed with other roles, such as GeoAnalytics Server or Notebook Server, cannot be federated.
You cannot set server roles or enable and disable feature analysis services for your organization; both are set automatically.
The server site you federate should use a CA-signed certificate rather than a self-signed certificate.
To federate an ArcGIS GIS Server or ArcGIS Image Server site with your organization, see Configure Servers.