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.
What is 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.
Reverse 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 "Reverse 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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Open the Reverse Proxy lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Reverse Proxy as part of a larger topic.
Server-Side Caching
Caching at the server and infrastructure level, reverse proxies, CDNs, and full-page caching
foundation · caching strategies
Varnish Cache
The HTTP accelerator that sits in front of your web server, caching full HTTP responses at wire speed
foundation · caching strategies
Path-Based Routing
Routing requests to different backends based on the URL path, the backbone of microservices
foundation · load balancing proxies
Host-Based Routing
Route traffic to different backend services based on the hostname in the request
foundation · load balancing proxies
See also
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.
Load Balancer
Distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers so no single server gets overwhelmed. Like a traffic cop directing cars to different lanes.
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.