Proxy vs Reverse proxy

I recently watched a video by Hussain Nasser you can check it out here. This inspired me to learn and dig more. So after doing some research in different places, I do have my take on it.

So I would start with just

Proxy by definition:

the authority to represent someone else

I would like to mention where they usually sit in client to server interaction

So you can see usually when a client would make requests it does not go directly to the server. Instead, the proxy servers handle the requests. So let's say a client wanted to visit www.google.com, his request is initially forwarded by the forward proxy server. And on the server proxied by the reverse proxy server.

Based on this I was able to note some key points about both of them

Proxy	Reverse Proxy
Proxy for requests going out	Proxy for requests coming in
Sits closer to client	Sits closer to server
Use Cases: Blocking sites, Caching, Logging	Use Cases: Load Balancer, Caching, Canary deployment, Logging, Ingress
Usually your Internet Service Provider	Examples would be nginx, HaProxy

Note: This is a very simplistic blog, to present the idea at a glance.Will recommend creating your own list if you really want to understand in detail

Keep learning 🤘