Data center
A secure building filled with thousands of servers, plus the power, cooling, and network connections that keep them running.
What it tells you about a developer
Data center experience is specific and increasingly rare. A developer who has racked hardware, planned capacity, or managed physical networks usually comes from a large enterprise, a telecom, a hosting company, or the years before cloud adoption. They understand the layer the cloud hides, which makes them unusually strong at debugging problems other engineers treat as magic.
Every piece of the internet physically lives in a data center somewhere. Cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft own the largest ones and rent out the computing inside. Some companies still run their own, or rent rack space in a shared facility, which is called colocation. The cloud is data centers with a rental interface on top.