The AS supports the notion of "unmanaged" deployments, where, rather than uploading the deployment content to the server, which then serves it from its internal content repo, instead the filesystem path to the content is provided and the content is served directly from that location.

This mechanism is particularly helpful with exploded deployments; it's what the filesystem deployment scanner uses when it detects an exploded deployment.

The CLI supports this via the --unmanaged flag that can be passed to the "deploy" command.

The console should expose this functionality as well.

If this were used in a managed domain, it's the responsibility of the user to ensure that the content is available at the provided path on all relevant hosts in the domain. EAP itself takes no responsibility for managing that content.