Networking

Reverse proxy

Server-side proxy that fronts your backend.


In plain terms

NGINX, Envoy, Caddy, HAProxy. TLS termination, load balancing, caching, header rewriting.

Origin

The pattern goes back to early caching proxies (Squid, 1996). Nginx (2004) and HAProxy (2001) cemented it as a separate tier in modern architectures.

Where it shows up in production
  • Nginx TLS termination + load balancing for ~33% of the top-million sites.
  • Envoy CNCF graduated; the data plane behind Istio, Consul Connect, and Google's Cloud Run.
  • HAProxy Stack Overflow famously runs all their traffic through a small HAProxy fleet.
On Semicolony
Sources & further reading
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