The cloud sounds like a mythical place where things are magically tucked away until you need them. The reality is that your data (data created from applications, or needed by applications) are stored in a data center either onsite on someone’s private cloud or a service provider’s public cloud.
A cloud, or data center, is just the platform (or environment, or group of servers and storage) where applications are stored.
A data center is made of rows and rows of cabinets, or racks, which contain storage, networking and compute devices.
The storage devices are where data from applications (and a whole bunch of other important stuff) are saved.
Networking devices (think "traffic directors") and networking cables (think "highways") make it possible to send and receive data to and from users, so that users can access and save their data from their applications.
Servers, basically power the application by feeding it two very important resources: CPU (or processing power) and RAM (Memory).
So who manages all this hardware?
You have a Data Center manager looking over all the hardware and controlling who comes in and out of the data center.
There are storage and database admins who are making sure the applications always have access to its data and that the data is being stored and groomed properly.
You have network managers and security specialists who are making sure the data is going where it needs to go, that it's getting there fast enough, and that no one else can touch it!
And then you have compute admins (or system administrators, or OS administrators) who make sure the application has enough processing power (CPU) and memory (RAM) for the application to behave properly, and platform administrators (or Cloud Administrators) who make that the environment, or the servers the application is running on, is healthy.
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