Table of contents
- Proxies:
Proxies:
Proxies are intermediaries between a user and a server, client and server.
What is a Forward Proxy?
A forward proxy acts as an intermediary between clients and the internet. It allows clients to request resources from servers while hiding their identities. This is especially useful for maintaining privacy, bypassing geo-restrictions, and improving performance by caching content.
Types of Forward Proxies and Their Use Cases
1. Residential Proxy
- A residential proxy uses IP addresses provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to mimic real user connections. It's ideal for tasks like web scraping, data mining, and market research where authentic IP addresses are crucial.
2. Data Center Proxy
- Data center proxies, on the other hand, are not tied to a physical location and are typically faster and more affordable. They are commonly used for tasks like social media automation, ad verification, and price scraping.
Use Cases of Forward Proxies
Enhanced Privacy: Protecting the identity and location of users.
Circumventing Restrictions: Accessing geo-restricted content or services.
Content Caching: Improving performance by storing frequently accessed content.
What is a Reverse Proxy?
A reverse proxy sits between servers and clients, intercepting incoming requests and routing them to the appropriate backend server. This provides an extra layer of security and load distribution, making it an essential component for web applications.
Types of Reverse Proxies and Their Use Cases
1. Application-Level Proxy
- This type operates at the application layer(OSI layer 7) and is aware of the application protocols (HTTP, HTTPS). It can perform tasks like content caching, rate limiting and SSL, TLS termination, load balancing, inspecting and modifying HTTP requests and responses, and routing requests based on URL patterns( to different origin servers based on URL).
2. Network-Level Proxy
- It can only see TCP/IP packets and cannot inspect HTTP traffic(OSI Layer 4). They handle any type of traffic but lack the application-specific features of an application-level proxy. It can perform Basic load balancing and caching. This is easier to configure and has lower overhead since they do not inspect HTTP traffic
Load Balancer:
A load balancer is a device or software component that evenly distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers. This ensures no single server becomes overloaded, providing high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
What Load Balancer Can Do That Reverse Proxy Cannot Do:
Traffic Distribution:
- Load balancers are specifically designed to distribute traffic across multiple servers for optimal performance.
High Availability:
- Ensure uninterrupted service even if some servers fail by redirecting traffic to healthy servers.
Scalability:
- Load balancers easily scale by adding or removing servers based on the traffic load.
What Reverse Proxy Can Do That Load Balancer Cannot Do:
Content Caching:
- Reverse proxies can cache frequently accessed content to improve performance and reduce server load.
SSL Termination:
- They can decrypt SSL/TLS traffic before it reaches the backend servers, offloading this process from the servers themselves.
Application-Level Awareness:
- Reverse proxies understand and can make decisions based on application-layer protocols, allowing for more sophisticated handling of requests.
Security Measures:
- Reverse proxies add a layer of security by preventing direct access to backend servers acting as a shield, and intercepting and filtering incoming requests.
Load Distribution Based on Application Logic:
- If your application requires more nuanced load distribution based on the specific content or type of request, a reverse proxy can make decisions at the application layer.
In the load balancer, caching is not recommended and it is dedicated to the distribution of traffic. Such caching can be done on the application level/ dedicated cache layer like memcache/ redis. To know more about cache check this out
Conclusion
Reverse proxies can do the work of a load balancer but a load balancer is very specific to distributing the load to a cluster of nodes/servers, while reverse proxies add an extra layer of security and application-specific request handling so we can say a load balancer is a reverse proxy but a reverse proxy is not necessarily a load balancer. Have fun learning 🚀