What is the difference between a data center and the cloud?
A data center is the physical facility — power, cooling, cabling, racks, and security — that houses servers. The cloud is a service model (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) that rents computing capacity running inside someone else's data center. Every cloud service runs in a data center, but not every data center is a cloud. When you build your own, you get cloud-like flexibility on infrastructure you control.