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

What is Disks in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application? In Laravel, disks should be understood as part of a larger application architecture rather than as an isolated API call. Storage disks describe where files are stored and how the filesystem adapter should access them. 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 disks: Storage disks describe where files are stored and how the filesystem adapter should access them. 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.