Are we moving away from hosting feature layers in AGOL?

[drewcole232]

I attended a user conference recently and I may be remembering this wrong, but I believe I heard a speaker from ESRI say something along the lines of 'get out of the habit of storing your data in feature layers' during a workshop for ArcGIS Enterprise admin. 

Again, I have no idea if this is what I actually heard, but it's been on my mind for a while now and I figured I would ask the community. Our organization does not have an enterprise agreement, so it's probably not  relevant to us yet.  

Thank you

[jcarlson]

I would be very surprised if that were the case. If anything, Esri has been making strides to get hosted feature layers on par with more advanced enterprise geodatabase layers.

[drewcole232]

Thank you, Josh. I'm sure that I misheard or misinterpreted something that was said. 

[ChristopherCounsell · Accepted solution]

They probably meant you should consider other service types. Most GIS users tend to publish hosted feature layers are they allow for everything - queries, editing etc.. But they are heavier than some of the new service types that can pre-render in tiles (server-side resources) or take advantage of modern technology

e.g. Vector Tile layers:

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/reference/tile-layers.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_8F68399EB47B48FF9EF4...

Hosted Feature Layers are still definitely useful. I've seen no indication that they will be on the way out. But spatial professionals have long been neglecting other service types such as Map Service which may be more appropriate in a number of circumstances...

Same with Hosted vs SDE/referenced. Saw this debate a lot a while ago but recently the discussion has resurfaced. Hosted layers don't mean SDEs/Server/Referenced are getting replaced. It means we as publishers have more options and in some scenarios one of the publishing methods will be much more suitable.