Laravel Lumen is a micro-framework based on the Laravel framework, designed for building fast, lightweight, and efficient applications and APIs. Here are some key aspects of Laravel Lumen:

1. Purpose: Lumen is tailored for microservices and API development. It focuses on providing a minimalist framework that retains the essential features of Laravel without the additional overhead.

2. Performance: Because it strips away many of Laravel's features that are not essential for building APIs, Lumen can handle requests faster and with lower latency.

3. Similarity to Laravel: Lumen shares the same core components as Laravel, which means developers familiar with Laravel will find it easy to pick up and use Lumen. It retains a similar syntax and many of the same features, such as routing, middleware, and service providers.

4. Components: It includes essential components like:

   • Routing: For defining API endpoints.

   • Middleware: For filtering HTTP requests entering the application.

   • Validation: For ensuring the data passed to the API meets certain criteria.

   • Eloquent ORM: For interacting with the database.

   • Queuing: For background job processing.