Forward and Reverse Proxy

There are two types of proxies, forward and a reverse proxy

Forward Proxy

In forward proxy all the client traffic is passed through a intermediary server, in this manner the application serving the request doesn’t know from where the originated.

This helps in overcoming website restrictions and other blocks, it’s also used by organization’s to protect the client server from connecting to malicious websites by forwarding the traffic through a tested and secure proxy server that can block attacks and websites

Use Cases

• Caching
• Logging
• Anonymity
• Block Sites
• Microservices

Forward Proxy

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Reverse Proxy

In a reverse proxy setup the client doesn’t know which server is responding to the application request, as the client connects with the reverse proxy server like NGINX

This allows us to have security levels at the TLS termination level and allow application communication behind the proxy, this enables us to cache the request and load balance between the application servers

Here are some use cases

• Caching
• Load Balancer
• Ingress / Ingress Controller
• Canary Deployment
• Micro services

A very nice use case is using the the Reverse Proxy as a API gateway and route the application requests from different locations to the required websites

Reverse Proxy

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