Grokking the System Design Interview

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Proxies

What is a proxy server?

A proxy server is an intermediate piece of software or hardware that sits between the client and the server. Clients connect to a proxy to make a request for a service like a web page, file, or connection from the server. Essentially, a proxy server (aka the forward proxy) is a piece of software or hardware that facilitates the request for resources from other servers on behalf of clients, thus anonymizing the client from the server.

Typically, forward proxies are used to cache data, filter requests, log requests, or transform requests (by adding/removing headers,

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Kunal Behrunani

Kunal Behrunani

· 17 days ago

This artcile is kinda vague & seems to drift from the real idea of proxy. Throughout this artcile, it claims the idea of proxy is to anonymize the identity of a particular side (client or the server) but in reality, anonymity is a side effect of having proxy & not the original design choice. It can or even cannot (in cases not required as per business choice) help with anonymity.

Proxy is more about controlling one of the two side of the traffic i.e the client or the server.

Eg. In case of a company laptop, the aim is to control the client side. The arbitary or unbounded side is the whole internet. Use case involves client not able to access certain websites etc. In that case, a forward proxy can be deployed that shall monitor all of the outbound traffic from that client. Now, in certain

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Shubham Saxena

· 2 years ago

"In addition to coordinating requests from multiple servers, proxies can also optimize request traffic from a system-wide perspective. Proxies can combine the same data access requests into one request and then return the result to the user; this technique is called collapsed forwarding. Consider a request for the same data across several nodes, but the data is not in cache. By routing these requests through the proxy, they can be consolidated into one so that we will only read data from the disk once."

Didnt quite catch this. Can this be explained with a better example?

Show 2 replies
Jlsegb

Jlsegb

· 4 months ago

For anyone being confused with the diagram, like me. The internet is not actually splitting a single proxy request into 2. The internet part of the picture just shows that the request from the proxy goes over the internet. So the proxy still has to make 2 requests (for the 2 servers) in the forward proxy section.