Is there a standard way to deploy Umbraco without the backoffice? Some other cmses call this Author / Publish.
I want to configure 2 sites, the public site which does not have a backoffice, and an author site which does have the backoffice. Both of those sites will target the same database, but the author site will only be accessible from within an internal vpn.
The benefit of this approach is security. If there is no backend available on the public site and it is essentially a read only copy of the site it is much harder to hack.
You can deploy the website on one of the servers without the /Umbraco or /Umbraco-client folders which will effectively remove the backoffice. What you're really looking at is a load-balanced scenario. Umbraco 7.3 makes this really easy and there's a fair bit of documentation available.
I would recommend taking a look at the Load Balancing documentation on https://our.umbraco.org/Documentation/Getting-Started/Setup/Server-Setup/Load-Balancing/ - it includes a "recipe" for previous versions along with a good guide on the pitfalls.