When it comes to cloud, you’ve got a lot of decisions to make. Choosing your cloud strategy starts with determining public, private, or hybrid environments. Many organizations opt for both—the hybrid cloud approach.

But that’s not the end of the decision. Once you decide to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy, you must also decide whether to go with a homogenous or a heterogenous hybrid cloud environment.

What does this mean? Let’s find out.

Hybrid cloud basics

Choosing a homogenous or heterogenous cloud is based on a hybrid cloud strategy. So let’s briefly review the three main cloud environments. Public cloud is cloud computing that’s delivered across the internet. Private cloud is cloud computing that’s dedicated to your single organization—no others—and it can be on premises or off-site through your vendor.

Hybrid cloud is a mix of these two environments. It’s what most organizations opt for in their cloud strategy. Hybrid allows you to take advantage of:

• The affordability and agility of public cloud when you want it—for certain data storage types, many “as a service” offerings.
• The security and privacy of private cloud when you need it—for securing certain types of data or for running heavy compute loads.

Once you opt for a hybrid cloud, you have to make another decision: homogenous or heterogenous.

What is a homogeneous cloud?

Simply put, a homogenous cloud is one where everything is from the same vendor. That single vendor supplies both your public cloud access and offerings and any private cloud you might have, both on-prem or off-site.

More technically, a homogeneous cloud is one where the entire software stack, from the hypervisor (remote cloud provider), through various intermediate management layers, all the way to the end-user portal, is provided by a single vendor.

Many enterprise providers used to offer this approach, but this fell out of the market years ago. Traditionally, hybrid cloud options were simply software stacks that you’d run on premises that also integrated with a public cloud. This has changed. Cloud providers are now releasing physical appliances—hardware. More recent pushes from Azure and AWS, however, are aiming for a homogenous cloud renaissance.