What is Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting?

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon.com, used the term "undifferentiated heavy lifting" in a 2006 post to describe all the hard technology work commonly done by businesses that don't add value to the business or its customers, but are a necessary step to add value.

For example, consider setting up a server in a data center to run a website. The website is differentiated from all others to create unique value for customers and the business. The server, on the other hand, is something all businesses need to deliver a website. Buying and maintaining servers in data centres consumes significant time and effort — especially for businesses that need a lot of them –– but does not provide any unique value to the business. The time and effort to setup and maintain those servers is undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) started by eliminating traditional technology tasks like buying and setting up physical servers, connecting them to the internet, and managing the inevitable hardware failures. Instead, businesses rent servers in the cloud that are setup and managed by cloud providers, billed by the minute, and ready to go at a moment's notice.

Cloud computing has worked out very well for many organizations — from startups to enterprises — who prefer to focus on solving problems that deliver value to customers rather than solving undifferentiated problems.

Vogels suggests that businesses should “stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting" and instead "acquire resources on demand, pay for what you use, leverage each other’s competencies, turn fixed costs into variable.” These ideas have been revolutionary for many businesses that leverage cloud services.

Initially, the benefits were limited to infrastructure teams (who no longer need to manage physical servers) and finance teams (who can turn capital expenditures into operating expenses). Software teams realized limited benefits. It takes just as much effort to build, deploy and maintain a traditional software solution on a cloud server as it does with a server in a data center.

Modern cloud service providers continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the solutions they offer. In a podcast, Eric Brewer, VP of infrastructure at Google, describes it as the "new cloud". He points out that the way we use cloud computing has changed. Instead of talking about managing servers, we're talking about managing the applications or services that run on them.

For example, Google Cloud and others offer solutions that allow software developers to deploy their applications or services without worrying about servers. Google Cloud will find an appropriate server to run their applications as needed.

Cloud providers aren't the only ones removing toil for software developers. The concept of undifferentiated heavy lifting can be applied to any number of software development tasks. AI assistants like GitHub's Copilot can write a lot of necessary, but undifferentiated, code so that developers can focus on solving problems that create differentiated value for customers and the business.