Grokking the System Design Interview
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Proxy vs. Reverse Proxy

Your office laptop cannot open a streaming site. The request never left the building. A server in the middle inspected it and blocked it.

The system you are designing has a server in the middle too. Every request from the internet lands on one Nginx machine first. That machine passes each request to one of six application servers behind it.

Both of those middle servers are proxies. A proxy is a server that sits between a client and a server and forwards requests. Everything in this lesson depends on one question. Which side does the proxy work for?

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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.

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