Undifferentiated heavy lifting is often used to describe when time, effort, resources, or money are deployed to perform tasks that will not add to the bottom line of a company. Undifferentiated simply means that there is nothing to distinguish the activity from the way others do it. Heavy lifting refers to the difficult task of technology innovation and operations which, if done correctly, nobody ever recognizes, and if done wrong, can cause catastrophic consequences to business operations. These phrases combined mean that when a company does difficult tasks—that if done wrong will cause business impact, but that company doesn't have a core competency to distinguish itself in doing these tasks—it not only doesn't add business value, but can easily detract from the business.
Unfortunately, this describes a large majority of the IT operations for enterprise companies, and is a critical selling point to using the cloud. Cloud vendors do have a core competency in technology innovation and operations at a scale that most companies could never dream of. Therefore, it only makes sense that cloud vendors have matured their services to include managed offerings, where they own the management of all aspects of the service and the consumer only needs to develop the business logic or data being deployed to the service. This will allow the undifferentiated heavy lifting to be shifted from the company to the cloud vendor, and allow that company to dedicate significantly more resources to creating business value (their differentiators).
As we have seen, there are lots of combinations of cloud services that can be used to design cloud native architectures using only the basic building blocks and patterns; however, as a design team grows in their understanding of the chosen cloud vendor's services and becomes more mature in their approach, they will undoubtedly want to use more advanced cloud services. Mature cloud vendors will have managed service offerings that are often able to replace components that require undifferentiated heavy lifting. Managed service offerings from cloud vendors would include the following:
- Databases
- Hadoop
- Directory services
- Load balancers
- Caching systems
- Data warehouses
- Code repositories
- Automation tools
- Elastic searching tools
Another area of importance for these services is the agility they bring to a solution. If a system were designed to use these tools but managed by the company operations team, often the process to provision the virtual instance, configure, tune, and secure the package will significantly slow the progress being made by the design team. Using cloud vendor managed service offerings in place of those self-managed components will allow the teams to implement the architecture quickly, and begin the process of testing the applications that will run in that environment.
Using managed service offerings from a cloud vendor doesn't necessarily lead to more advanced architecture patterns; however, it does lead to the ability to think bigger and not be constrained by undifferentiated heavy lifting. This concept of not being constrained by limitations that are normally found on-premises, like finite physical resources, is a critical design attribute when creating cloud native architectures, which will enable systems to reach a scale hard to achieve elsewhere. For example, some areas where using a cloud vendor managed service offering would allow for a more scalable and native cloud architecture are as follows:
- Using managed load balancers to decouple components in an architecture
- Leveraging managed data warehouse systems to provision only the storage required and letting it scale automatically as more data is imported
- Using managed RDBMS database engines to enable quick and efficient transactional processing with durability and high availability built in