Reverse proxy

  • A reverse proxy accepts a request from a client, forwards it to a server that can fulfill it, and returns the server’s response to the client.

  • A load balancer distributes incoming client requests among a group of servers, in each case returning the response from the selected server to the appropriate client.

A reverse proxy is a web server that centralizes internal services and provides unified interfaces to the public. Requests from clients are forwarded to a server that can fulfill it before the reverse proxy returns the server's response to the client.

reverse proxy 是一个集中式的 web server，它集合了内部的 services 和 interfaces，然后由它发给 backend servers 处理。

Additional benefits include:

  • Increased security - Hide information about backend servers, blacklist IPs, limit number of connections per client

  • Increased scalability and flexibility - Clients only see the reverse proxy's IP, allowing you to scale servers or change their configuration

  • SSL termination - Decrypt incoming requests and encrypt server responses so backend servers do not have to perform these potentially expensive operations

  • Compression - Compress server responses

  • Caching - Return the response for cached requests

  • Static content - Serve static content directly

    • HTML/CSS/JS

    • Photos

    • Videos

    • Etc

Load balancer vs reverse proxy

  • Deploying a load balancer is useful when you have multiple servers. Often, load balancers route traffic to a set of servers serving the same function.

  • Reverse proxies can be useful even with just one web server or application server, opening up the benefits described in the previous section.

  • Solutions such as NGINX and HAProxy can support both layer 7 reverse proxying and load balancing.

reverse proxy 更多的是在有一个 web server 和一个 application server 的时候也有用。load balancer 是对多个，同类型的 server 有用。

Disadvantage(s): reverse proxy

  • Introducing a reverse proxy results in increased complexity.

  • A single reverse proxy is a single point of failure, configuring multiple reverse proxies (ie a failover) further increases complexity.

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