From an architecture perspective, the My Sites or OneDrive feature is really just a specialized site collection that hosts individual user SharePoint sites. It has a specific template (the My Site Host template) that's used to store personal files and content. You can think of it as a potential replacement for standard file share-based home directories.
My Sites and the User Profile service have interdependencies: a My Sites site collection is required for the User Profile service (which we'll get to in the next section); My Sites requires a User Profile service application, while the User Profile service requires that we assign a My Sites collection as part of the configuration. My Sites also requires a Managed Metadata service application (you'll learn more about the Managed Metadata service application in Chapter 7, Planning and Configuring Managed Metadata). Configuring My Sites requires a little bit of back and forth...