The key features of a reverse proxy

What's the difference between a load balancer and a reverse proxy?

There's a lot of confusion and mis-information in the tech community around these two terms.

I'm writing this to clear things up.

In this post, I'll describe the differences between a load balancer and a reverse proxy (reverse proxy is often called a "proxylizer", but that's not a thing). The goal is to help you decide what tool you need for the job you want to do. If you know what you want to do, you can usually figure out what tool to use, but if you don't, this guide can help.

We'll use HTTP/2 in our examples, but these concepts apply to most protocols. The difference between a load balancer and a reverse proxy. The way I like to explain the difference is that a load balancer is a tool that takes care of choosing a server to send a request to. A reverse proxy is a tool that takes care of choosing a response for a request.

The main use cases for these tools are: Load balancing between many servers (eg a web server cluster). Serve static content (eg static images) from many servers. Serve dynamic content (eg web pages) from many servers. Serve content from many servers (eg web server cluster). Serve content from many servers (eg web server cluster) A reverse proxy is usually cheaper, more reliable, and has better performance than a load balancer, but a load balancer can do some things a reverse proxy can't. A reverse proxy can be used as a load balancer by adding some features, but not all features. A reverse proxy can be used as a load balancer with fewer features than a load balancer.

A load balancer and a reverse proxy are both called reverse proxies. I've seen people call the first type of tool a "load balancer" and the second type of tool a "reverse proxy". But that's incorrect. A "reverse proxy" is a specific kind of tool that's used for the second type of use case.

Reverse proxies vs. Load balancers Most of the time, a reverse proxy is used for serving content, not for load balancing. Why? For serving content, a reverse proxy can do many things a load balancer can't do.

Can a load balancer be a proxy?

I have a VPS running on an Amazon Lightsail instance and I use a load balancer (AWS's Cloudfront) to load balance connections. I run 2 NodeJS servers in this VM and I connect to it with the port 8080 on my local network. When I send requests to the load balancer it appears to go directly to one of the NodeJS servers.

Can I still setup the load balancer to work as a proxy so that requests on the NodeJS servers still appear to come from the Internet? 1 Answer. Yes. That is not how it works. However, you could probably just get better results by setting up some kind of reverse proxy server or HAProxy server that does the load balancing for you. It would be easier. Then, you can configure Node.js to talk to the proxy and it will send your requests to the load balancer.

What is the difference between reverse proxy and load balancer vs API gateway?

From a theoretical basis there is no difference for API Gateway.

It's just another entry point into your app.

For example, assume you have this request/response: Client -> API Gateway -> Server A (reverse proxy) -> Server B. If you use the Proxy method, the response will contain the response from Server A - hence your server does need to expose both responses. If you choose one of the other methods you don't necessarily need this response. It could be done directly on the server.

Is a load balancer a reverse proxy?

I'm looking into setting up a load balancer, and was wondering if it would be the same as setting up a reverse proxy?

A load balancer does two things: Assists in keeping your application servers alive (by providing a high availability service). Reduces the load on your application servers (by assigning servers to requests). A reverse proxy does only one thing: Assists in keeping your application servers alive (by providing a high availability service). It's a bit like a router. A load balancer is a bit like a switch - you set up a group of servers and make sure they stay alive, it's a "first come, first served" process, whereas a reverse proxy allows you to ensure that every server is equally "active", by spreading requests over all the available servers, rather than simply keeping the few "alive" servers busy.

What are the benefits of reverse proxy?

If you have a web application (such as a website), then you have a set of clients connecting to it. These clients may be browsers, mobile apps, a game or a program running on a server. Each client connects and gets a response from your web application.

This may happen in one way or another. The browser might connect directly to the server and then receive the response. Or, it might connect to a proxy (such as a HTTP reverse proxy) and then the reverse proxy sends the response to your server. In this case, we call the proxy a reverse proxy.

In the first scenario, the client is making direct network connections to your server. In the second scenario, the proxy is providing a service that makes these connections for you.

Both of these scenarios are not ideal. Clients make direct network connections which can be slow, or expensive depending on the client and the data rate. In the case of proxies, the proxy needs to maintain a connection to the client and thus consumes network resources.

How does a reverse proxy work? A reverse proxy is a software service that takes traffic from the client, and then makes it available to your server. To make this possible, the reverse proxy needs to be able to receive requests from the client and then forward them to your server. For example, in the case of a web server, the proxy will make requests to the browser, get the response and then forward the response to your web server.

The proxy server can be implemented in many ways, such as: Apache httpd with a proxy module. IIS with a web proxy. NGINX (which has an embedded web proxy). When it comes to Apache httpd, it is often referred to as a proxy reverse proxy. It is also called a proxying load balancer or a web cache server.

How is a reverse proxy better? A reverse proxy is a service that saves you from a few problems. It's a better alternative than directly connecting to your server.

The major benefits of reverse proxies include: They reduce the number of network connections. They speed up the data transfer. They help reduce bandwidth usage. They are efficient in terms of disk usage. They are secure.