Grokking the System Design Interview
Vote

0% completed

​

Proxy vs. Reverse Proxy

An employee tries to open a video streaming site on an office laptop. The page does not load. The request never reaches the website. A server inside the company network checks the request and blocks it.

Now think about a shopping website. Every request from the internet first reaches one Nginx server. That server passes each request to one of six application servers behind it.

Both of these middle servers are proxies. A proxy is a server that sits between a client and another server, and forwards requests between them. But the two proxies do very different jobs

.....

.....

.....

Like the course? Get enrolled and start learning!
Divyanshu Varma

Divyanshu Varma

· a year ago

We skip forward proxies in backend-focused system designs because system design interviews focus on:

  • Backend architecture
  • Scalability, consistency, fault tolerance
  • Microservices, queues, storage

So we mostly diagram server-side architecture, and clients are treated as a black box.

However, API Gateway (and sometimes even the LB) is acting as a reverse proxy and we need it all the time in system design interviews. Just put a load balancer before it and put multiple instances of API gateway.

Show 2 replies

Reading Progress

0%

Vote for new content