Reverse Proxy Server Comparison
The Difference Between Proxy and Reverse Proxy | strongDM
Many businesses use proxy servers to route and secure traffic between networks. There’s often confusion, however, on how this differs from a reverse proxy. In this post, we’ll dissect the two concepts and explain how administrators can use a reverse proxy for easy access management is a proxy server? A proxy server, sometimes referred to as a forward proxy, is a server that routes traffic between client(s) and another system, usually external to the network. By doing so, it can regulate traffic according to preset policies, convert and mask client IP addresses, enforce security protocols, and block unknown stems with shared networks, such as business organizations or data centers, often use proxy servers. Proxy servers expose a single interface with which clients interact without having to enforce all of the policies and route management logic within the clients is a reverse proxy? A reverse proxy is a type of proxy server. Unlike a traditional proxy server, which is used to protect clients, a reverse proxy is used to protect servers. A reverse proxy is a server that accepts a request from a client, forwards the request to another one of many other servers, and returns the results from the server that actually processed the request to the client as if the proxy server had processed the request itself. The client only communicates directly with the reverse proxy server and it does not know that some other server actually processed its request. A traditional forward proxy server allows multiple clients to route traffic to an external network. For instance, a business may have a proxy that routes and filters employee traffic to the public Internet. A reverse proxy, on the other hand, routes traffic on behalf of multiple servers. A reverse proxy effectively serves as a gateway between clients, users, and application servers. It handles all the access policy management and traffic routing, and it protects the identity of the server that actually processes the verse proxy configurationBy routing client traffic through a reverse proxy, admins can simplify security administration. They can configure backend servers to only accept traffic directly from the proxy and then configure the granular access control configurations on the proxy example, admins can configure the reverse proxy’s firewall to whitelist or blacklist specific IP addresses. All existing servers behind the proxy will be protected accordingly, and whenever admins add a new backend server to the network that is configured to only accept requests from the proxy server, the new backend server is protected according to the proxy configuration. Using a reverse proxy can also allow administrators to easily swap backend servers in and out without disrupting traffic. Because clients interact directly with the proxy, they only need to know its host name and don’t need to worry about changes to the backend network topology. In addition to simplifying client configuration, an admin can configure a reverse proxy to load-balance traffic so that requests can be more evenly distributed to the backend servers and improve overall case: onboarding and off-boardingWhen onboarding a new user to a network, administrators must configure access control and firewalls to ensure the user can access the appropriate resources. Traditionally, an admin has to configure each server for which users need access. In a large organization with many servers, this can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. However, with a reverse proxy, administrators can configure the access rights directly on the proxy server and have the user route all traffic through it. As such, the backend servers only need to trust and communicate with the proxy directly. This greatly simplifies the configuration process and helps ensure access is granted and revoked correctly by doing so through a single tting up a reverse proxy for access managementWhile a reverse proxy can greatly simplify the process of managing access to a network, setting it up and configuring it properly can get complicated. It requires provisioning the host with appropriate specifications, configuring the operating system and firewall, deciding on which proxy software to use (such as NGINX or HAProxy), enumerating and configuring the downstream servers in the proxy configuration files, setting up audit logging, and configuring the firewalls in all the downstream servers. An administrator will need to optimize the proxy software to adjust for performance and availability requirements. For example, when a downstream server fails, the admin should configure the proxy server to quickly reroute traffic to avoid scale, the out-of-the-box configurations are rarely sufficient, so testing becomes important. Whenever the configurations change, you’ll need a way to run sufficient load against a representative test environment and closely monitor the impact on both performance and availability to verify that configurations will meet the needs of the production ing a reverse proxy by hand vs. buying softwareGiven all the steps involved in implementing, testing, and optimizing a reverse proxy, you may choose to buy software that can provide this functionality without all the custom work. Access management software can provide all of this functionality while also managing the ongoing maintenance and user management. In addition to providing standard reverse proxy capabilities, access management software affords a number of unique benefits:1) Flexibility with user access. By abstracting away the complexity of firewalls and access control, access management software can provide higher-level concepts like user groups. This functionality makes it easy for admins to assign and remove users from various predefined groups and allows the software to automatically implement the access policies. 2) Designed to boost reliability. In distributed systems, servers can fail and network interruptions may occur. Access management software easily detects failed servers and reroutes traffic to working ones to avoid any noticeable downtime for users. 3) Load balancing capabilities. Single servers may struggle when hit with a large amount of traffic, which degrades performance and increases request latency. Access management software can help to manage traffic and balance the load across all servers, making sure it’s evenly naging access with strongDMThe strongDM control plane is a proxy-based solution that simplifies authentication and authorization for admins. It routes all database and server connections through its protocol-aware proxy over a TLS 1. 2 secure TCP connection, and it handles load balancing and automatic failover to provide high availability. The proxy validates user sessions and permissions and then intelligently routes the session to the target database or server through the most efficient path, logging all traffic along the rongDM extends the single sign-on capabilities of your identity provider, allowing you to authenticate users to any server or database. From the Admin UI, you can view connected resources and manage role-based access control for your users. See for yourself with a free, 14-day trial. this post? Then get all that SDM goodness, right in your you! Your submission has been received! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
What is a Reverse Proxy vs. Load Balancer? – NGINX
Reverse proxy servers and load balancers are components in a client-server computing architecture. Both act as intermediaries in the communication between the clients and servers, performing functions that improve efficiency. They can be implemented as dedicated, purpose-built devices, but increasingly in modern web architectures they are software applications that run on commodity hardware.
The basic definitions are simple:
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.
But they sound pretty similar, right? Both types of application sit between clients and servers, accepting requests from the former and delivering responses from the latter. No wonder there’s confusion about what’s a reverse proxy vs. load balancer. To help tease them apart, let’s explore when and why they’re typically deployed at a website.
Load Balancing
Load balancers are most commonly deployed when a site needs multiple servers because the volume of requests is too much for a single server to handle efficiently. Deploying multiple servers also eliminates a single point of failure, making the website more reliable. Most commonly, the servers all host the same content, and the load balancer’s job is to distribute the workload in a way that makes the best use of each server’s capacity, prevents overload on any server, and results in the fastest possible response to the client.
A load balancer can also enhance the user experience by reducing the number of error responses the client sees. It does this by detecting when servers go down, and diverting requests away from them to the other servers in the group. In the simplest implementation, the load balancer detects server health by intercepting error responses to regular requests. Application health checks are a more flexible and sophisticated method in which the load balancer sends separate health-check requests and requires a specified type of response to consider the server healthy.
Another useful function provided by some load balancers is session persistence, which means sending all requests from a particular client to the same server. Even though HTTP is stateless in theory, many applications must store state information just to provide their core functionality – think of the shopping basket on an e-commerce site. Such applications underperform or can even fail in a load-balanced environment, if the load balancer distributes requests in a user session to different servers instead of directing them all to the server that responded to the initial request.
Reverse Proxy
Whereas deploying a load balancer makes sense only when you have multiple servers, it often makes sense to deploy a reverse proxy even with just one web server or application server. You can think of the reverse proxy as a website’s “public face. ” Its address is the one advertised for the website, and it sits at the edge of the site’s network to accept requests from web browsers and mobile apps for the content hosted at the website. The benefits are two-fold:
Increased security – No information about your backend servers is visible outside your internal network, so malicious clients cannot access them directly to exploit any vulnerabilities. Many reverse proxy servers include features that help protect backend servers from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, for example by rejecting traffic from particular client IP addresses (blacklisting), or limiting the number of connections accepted from each client.
Increased scalability and flexibility – Because clients see only the reverse proxy’s IP address, you are free to change the configuration of your backend infrastructure. This is particularly useful In a load-balanced environment, where you can scale the number of servers up and down to match fluctuations in traffic volume.
Another reason to deploy a reverse proxy is for web acceleration – reducing the time it takes to generate a response and return it to the client. Techniques for web acceleration include the following:
Compression – Compressing server responses before returning them to the client (for instance, with gzip) reduces the amount of bandwidth they require, which speeds their transit over the network.
SSL termination – Encrypting the traffic between clients and servers protects it as it crosses a public network like the Internet. But decryption and encryption can be computationally expensive. By decrypting incoming requests and encrypting server responses, the reverse proxy frees up resources on backend servers which they can then devote to their main purpose, serving content.
Caching – Before returning the backend server’s response to the client, the reverse proxy stores a copy of it locally. When the client (or any client) makes the same request, the reverse proxy can provide the response itself from the cache instead of forwarding the request to the backend server. This both decreases response time to the client and reduces the load on the backend server.
How Can NGINX Plus Help?
NGINX Plus and NGINX are the best-in-class reverse proxy and load balancing solutions used by high-traffic websites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. More than 400 million websites worldwide rely on NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source to deliver their content quickly, reliably, and securely.
NGINX Plus performs all the load-balancing and reverse proxy functions discussed above and more, improving website performance, reliability, security, and scale. As a software-based load balancer, NGINX Plus is much less expensive than hardware-based solutions with similar capabilities. The comprehensive load-balancing and reverse-proxy capabilities in NGINX Plus enable you to build a highly optimized application delivery network.
For details about how NGINX Plus implements the features described here, check out these resources:
Application Load Balancing with NGINX Plus
Application Health Checks with NGINX Plus
Session Persistence with NGINX Plus
Mitigating DDoS Attacks with NGINX and NGINX Plus
Compression and Decompression
SSL termination for HTTP and TCP
Content Caching in NGINX Plus
HAProxy vs. Nginx – Stack Overflow
I was looking at using HAProxy and Nginx for load balancing, and I had some questions:
Should I use JUST HAProxy over Nginx for the proxy server?
Is there any reason to have HAProxy and Nginx installed on the same proxy server?
Thanks
asked Jan 16 ’14 at 21:41
haproxy is a “load balancer” it doesn’t know to serve files or dynamic content. nginx is a web server capable of many interesting things. if you only need to load balance + HA some third web server then haproxy is enough. if you need to implement some static content or some logic in routing of the requests before terminating them on a third server then you may need nginx.
The reason you can see haproxy+nginx on the same host is that it allows you to bring down single nginx instances while haproxy continues to serve requests from other hosts. Imagine having a RR DNS using A records:
IN A 1. 1. 1
IN A 1. 2
where 1. 1 and 1. 2 are two hosts with haproxy+nginx configured to load balance between them. Now for some reason your 1. 1’s nginx goes down. The browsers that come to 1. 1 are still being served by haproxy on it which in turn gets data from 1. 2’s nginx.
hope it helps
answered Jan 17 ’14 at 8:24
Michael TabolskyMichael Tabolsky3, 1311 gold badge16 silver badges10 bronze badges
HAProxy is definitely the better, more fully featured loadbalancer (compared to the free nginx, not nginx plus (but one could argue that as well).
One thing that HAProxy sadly still can’t do is generic UDP connections. So we used HAProxy and nginx on our logging lbs. But HAProxy released support for syslog/udp in 2. 3 so we are about to change that. 🙂
answered Jan 8 at 9:12
TarwinTarwin4725 silver badges10 bronze badges
NGINX next to HAProxy looks like a 2CV next to a Tesla…
Benefits HAProxy:
Provides a comprehensive list of 61 different metrics. See section 9
for a full list of available statistics
The status page is much more detailed and user-friendly as compared to Nginx’s
Easily able to integrate with third-party monitoring services (e. g. Datadog)
IPV6, PROXY PROTOCOL, TRANSPARENT PROXY, SSL & SNI, HTTP2, API, LUA Scripting, RDP connection broker, Stick tables, multi-node session replication, DDOS & DOS protection…
Drawbacks HAProxy:
Does not provide other features that Nginx offers such as web server capabilities
Benefits Nginx:
Since Nginx is capable of doing much more than load balancing it is a much more versatile solution
Useful if you require a load balancer as well as a web server with advanced caching ability, and more
There is a community-developed module for greater statistic gathering than what is offered by default
Drawbacks Nginx:
Only provides 7 stat metrics which represent all sites on the server. There is no individual, per-site metrics available
The status page is not user-friendly nor does it provide many details
Very limited third-party monitoring integration possibilities
answered Dec 12 ’18 at 6:12
flikflik2, 8872 gold badges16 silver badges29 bronze badges
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Frequently Asked Questions about reverse proxy server comparison
Which is the best reverse proxy?
NGINX Plus and NGINX are the best-in-class reverse proxy and load balancing solutions used by high-traffic websites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. More than 400 million websites worldwide rely on NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source to deliver their content quickly, reliably, and securely.
Is Nginx better than HAProxy?
HAProxy is definitely the better, more fully featured loadbalancer (compared to the free nginx, not nginx plus (but one could argue that as well). One thing that HAProxy sadly still can’t do is generic UDP connections.Jan 8, 2021
What is reverse proxy server used for?
A reverse proxy server is an intermediate connection point positioned at a network’s edge. It receives initial HTTP connection requests, acting like the actual endpoint. Essentially your network’s traffic cop, the reverse proxy serves as a gateway between users and your application origin server.
