Benefits
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
- Removes the need to install X.509 certificates on each server
- 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
When to Use Each
- Load Balancer: 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 Proxy: Reverse proxies can be useful even with just one web server or application server, opening up the benefits described in the previous section.
- Both: Solutions such as NGINX and HAProxy can support both layer 7 reverse proxying and load balancing.
A reverse proxy can be beneficial even with a single backend server, while load balancers are specifically designed for distributing traffic across multiple servers.
Key Differences
| Aspect | Load Balancer | Reverse Proxy |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Purpose | Distribute traffic across multiple servers | Centralize and manage access to backend services |
| Minimum Servers | Multiple servers | Can work with single server |
| Use Case | High availability and horizontal scaling | Security, caching, SSL termination, serving static content |
Disadvantages of Reverse Proxy
Disadvantages of 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.