[Web Architecture] Reverse Proxy vs Load Balancing
According to nginx.com, the definition of Reverse Proxy and Load Balancer are: A reverse proxy accepts a request from a client, forwards it to a server that can fulfill it, and returns the server’s response to the client. A load balancer distributes incoming client requests among a group of servers, in each case returning the response from the selected server to the appropriate client At this point, it almost seems as if they are the same thing. Let's dive deeper to see the difference. Load Balancing Sometimes, the volume of requests generated from your website may be too much for one server to handle. In that case, you will use multiple servers. But even then, you will need something to distribute the requests to each server; evenly. This 'something' is the load balancer . They basically solve network traffic problems. Session Persistence A cool thing that I also read about is session persistence . Will need more researching for this.....