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

What is Cloud storage in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application? In Laravel, cloud storage should be understood as part of a larger application architecture rather than as an isolated API call. The same storage API can keep application logic relatively stable while deployment moves files from local disks to cloud storage. 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's filesystem abstraction provides a consistent API for local and cloud-backed storage disks. The specific focus here is cloud storage: The same storage API can keep application logic relatively stable while deployment moves files from local disks to cloud storage. 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.