Thanks for the update. To get around this issue, we were able to save off the SD file and then publish via arcpy: import arcpy
sd = '{path-to-sd-file}\SA.sd'
con = '{path-to-ags-file}\server.ags'
arcpy.UploadServiceDefinition_server(sd, con) A serendipitous find for sure since we now use this approach for all our service publishing.
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