What is the difference between AWS application load balancer and reverse proxy?

What is the purpose of a reverse proxy?

First answer: Reverse proxies are used in different contexts.

In the context that you are asking for a concrete example you can use it for two things: Make another (eg cloud-based) application visible at another domain (such as your bank or the bank of somebody else). This can be a solution when you want to access your private bank but want to hide your real IP address behind a reverse proxy. As long as you use a proper user agent string the other end won't know you're browsing your private bank through a public wifi hotspot.

Second answer: The second possible purpose of using a reverse proxy can be hiding an URL from a user. For example, if a user types in his browser, mybank.com will be a normal HTTP-server which answers with HTTP 200, but he'll never see which is running instead.

What is the difference between AWS application load balancer and reverse proxy?

We are using AWS Application load balancer and Reverse Proxy. While were going through details of both services, we found many similarities, however few differences also came in their way. So, before you start working on the services like Application load balancer and reverse proxy, know its differences and find the advantages and disadvantages.

AWS Application Load Balancer is a fully managed service that provides simple, dynamic, and highly available application load balancing to Amazon Web Services (AWS) applications. It allows you to dynamically distribute traffic across your application servers while securing it with security groups and subnets. It provides high-availability features for EC2 instances.

While were going through their details, we saw few differences: AWS application load balancer works over the AWS application load balancer as a reverse proxy but is not limited to just load balancing. The AWS application load balancer supports additional functionality, including securing APIs, routing HTTPS traffic, and enabling traffic forwarding.

AWS application load balancer gives more flexibility compared to the reverse proxy. With the help of Application Load Balancing, you can route requests to an endpoint and secure individual endpoints, such as Elastic Beanstalk instances, with security groups and subnets.

Both AWS application load balancer and reverse proxy secure data flow using rules and rules sets, which means when rules in the rules set for a rule do not match the incoming data, the rule still forwards it. In contrast, a reverse proxy sends the data to an origin server only if all incoming data matches the rules. That's why, we saw some difference.

It is the type of proxy that decides the availability and reliability of the service provided. Since it is called reverse proxy or load balancing reverse proxy, we will use this word in this article.

A typical setup consists of an ALB and two or three EC2 instances, which are configured to respond to requests for particular application resources via ALB. This is also called a backend-to-load-balancer configuration. Here, we will see how to create a backend-to-load-balancer load balancer.

In a traditional deployment, each container on the instance is assigned to a different service, and that service has its own load balancer port (80, 443) configured on the instance.

Is HAProxy a reverse proxy or load balancer?

I'm reading HAProxy website.

It seems to have both reverse proxy and load balancer function.

Reverse proxy should be used for: DNS - for dynamic IPs. SSL termination - with sticky ips. And load balancer should be used for: TCP/HTTP (tcp & http) - with sticky ips. UDP - for game protocol like tcp, udp, spd. Is HAProxy suitable for both? Can someone explain it to me

You do not need HAProxy for DNS. You can use HAProxy for SSL termination if you use IIS or other HTTP servers that support SSL.

UDP load balancing will only work if your clients are willing to do some extra effort, so it is not a standard thing that you can buy from market. (unless you count open source products as market.