Is it possible to do geoprocessing on the ArcGIS Server/Enterprise site from ArcGIS Pro?

[ThomasSteenbergen]

in our organization we are currently facing a transition from ArcMap towards ArcGIS Pro and/or ArcGIS Enterprise. Since ArcGIS Pro is demanding a lot more hardware than ArcMap, we are looking through all possibilities. Because Pro is demanding a lot of resources we were wondering if it is also possible to do all (or a lot) of analysis on the server site instead of locally on the desktop. That way, we need a smaller amount of resources locally. In theory we maybe want to use ArcGIS Enterprise servers for the geoprocessing of ArcGIS pro tools.

I saw some documentation on Geoprocessing services, which looks like it could do just that, but it seems like this is more focussed on custom geoprocesses. Is it possible to publish standard geoprocesses in portal, for instance a buffer, and use these processes in ArcGIS Pro? I'm not sure how user friendly this is and I'm also wondering if this makes geoprocessing potentially faster than using it on a local machine on desktop? And does this make it possible to keep the gpu and ram requirements on the minimum for ArcGIS Pro?

Thanks in advance.

[DrewFlater]

You can run a number of Standard Feature Analysis tools that are likely already available on your server, assuming you set up the spatial analysis capability and assign users in the enterprise the spatial analysis role. The tools are accessible in Pro as described here Portal tools—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop 

You can also share any tool from Pro to the enterprise as a web tool which starts a geoprocessing service on the federated server. This works for any custom tools as well as any Esri tools you might want to run as a service. What is a web tool?—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop 

In both cases the processing occurs on the server, so Pro can act as a light client to collect input parameters for a tool and visualize the output, with the server doing the heavy data processing. 

[ThomasSteenbergen]

Thanks for the info. I have made a testcase with a local ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise edition and geoprocessing services could be very handy. At the moment, I got some tools working but only with small datasets (5000 records). If I try to use geoprocessing services with larger datasets the geoprocessing stays stuck on 'pending'. The process never starts on the server site. Are there any known limitations on using this geoprocessing service method with ArcGIS Pro?

[DrewFlater]

Remember that when the processing is on the server, it means the data must also be on the server, so it will take some time to serialize and upload data from ArcGIS Pro to the server prior to the service actually running. These services are typically meant to run with smaller sized data sent from the client, but executing against larger datasets on the server. For example, if you have a Viewshed service, the server can store the DEM (the bigger dataset) and the client can sent simple points, and return the viewshed for those points. Services that would take both the DEM and the points as input from the client should be fine for smaller cases, but if the user is sending a big DEM up to the server the whole thing will be quite slow. If you have questions about how to design the geoprocessing service for best performance, take a look at the following topics:

Performance tips for geoprocessing services—ArcMap | ArcGIS Desktop 

Large dataset upload and download considerations—ArcMap | ArcGIS Desktop 

This is one advantage that the Standard Feature Analysis tools also provide - they primarily use data that is already located on the server or in the enterprise as input (web feature layers, etc.), so the processing doesn't need to move data around.