Forward Proxy
A proxy that sits in front of clients and forwards their requests to the internet. Used for anonymity, content filtering, and bypassing geo-restrictions.
What is Forward Proxy?
A proxy that sits in front of clients and forwards their requests to the internet. Used for anonymity, content filtering, and bypassing geo-restrictions.
Forward Proxy is a foundational concept that sits in the Load Balancing & Proxies area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Forward Proxy" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Proxy
An intermediary server that sits between the client and the destination server. Forward proxies act on behalf of clients; reverse proxies act on behalf of servers.
Reverse Proxy
A server that sits in front of your backend servers and forwards client requests to them. Handles SSL termination, caching, and load balancing.
CDN
A network of servers distributed globally that caches content close to users. Netflix uses CDNs to stream video from servers near you, not from one central location.