System Design
  • Introduction
  • Basics
    • Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
    • Load Balancing
    • Reverse Proxy
    • Cache
    • Sharding or Data Partitioning
    • Index
    • Redundancy and Replication
    • SQL vs NoSQL
  • Advanced
    • The Difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA
    • Consistent Hashing
    • Server-to-client Communication
    • Data Sharding
  • Database
    • SQL
    • ACID
    • Data Partitioning
  • News Feed
    • Design a News Feed System
    • Timeline creation with sharded data
    • Facebook News Feed
    • Twitter News Feed (Timeline)
    • How does facebook rank news feed?
  • Mint
    • Design Mint
  • Web Crawler
    • Design a web crawler
    • Design a decentralized web crawler
  • TODO
    • TODO
    • Elastic Search
    • Lucene
    • twitter-snowflake
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  1. Basics

Reverse Proxy

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Last updated 4 years ago

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Reference:

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.

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.

Disadvantage(s): reverse proxy

  • Introducing a reverse proxy results in increased complexity.

Source(s) and further reading

Removes the need to install on each server

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

X.509 certificates
failover
Reverse proxy vs load balancer
NGINX architecture
HAProxy architecture guide
Wikipedia
https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#reverse-proxy-web-server