What is Session storage in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application?

What is Session storage in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application? In Laravel, session storage should be understood as part of a larger application architecture rather than as an isolated API call. Session data can be stored using the application's configured session driver. A strong understanding includes its purpose, the layer where it belongs, the data or request flow it affects, and the situations where another mechanism may be more appropriate. Practical context: Laravel sessions persist server-side user state across requests, while cookies store small client-side values sent back with subsequent requests. The specific focus here is session storage: Session data can be stored using the application's configured session driver. This question is designed to test not only terminology, but also how the concept fits into Laravel's request, application, database, security, or deployment workflow.