Proxy : A Deep dive into Forward and reverse

Introduction

You guys might have often heard these terms proxy and VPN and often might have used them but ever wondered how they are working behind the scenes. Chill then this the right place to envision the working and i will be guiding you the step by step working and how it can be implemented and where it can be used in the real world scenarios.

Proxy

Proxy are nothing but a middleman who will be masking your IP address and provides you an anonymity in this social network. When a client hits a request to proxy instead of directly hitting the server here the proxy acts as a middleman and proxy first processes the client’s request and forward it to the respective server, now the server will have the idea of the proxy’s ip as the origin ip for that request and have no idea of how and where these network request came through.

Real world scenario

Think of you are now sitting in a Star Bucks and you are ordering your Americano to the waiter and the waiter now takes the order in his mobile and passes to the kitchen, The kitchen only knows the order here the request payload that the end server receives from the waiter here the proxy and does not know about the client who is hitting the API calls in this case its YOU.

Use cases

Now you have a basic idea of what proxy does and how proxies are working. Now if you think of proxy can only mask the IP then you’re in a right track to get an idea about the use cases where this can be incorporated

Heard the term load balancing and multiplexing? Yes its nothing but balancing the network traffic to multiple servers. Instead of hitting the api calls directly to the end server the api calls will be landed to the proxy machines. These proxy servers have a dedicated purpose to monitor how many servers are present how many servers are currently handling requests and how many servers are free and to which server I can forward this request. Proxy basically multiplexes the request and acts as a multiplexer here.

That’s it? Nahh Buddy. Proxy can do more. Proxies can acts as your caching buddy. Heard the term edge server? Think of your Data Centre located in New York and you sits somewhere in the middle of the Bangalore traffic in your car reading this blog post. The first time you hit the call it will be landing to the New York and all the data will be fetched and stored it in a edge server which will be somewhere located in India, say Mumbai. Now your further calls of the same static files are landed to this server and now BOOM your latency is reduced drastically. This CDN in edge server follows the proxy mechanism.

Reverse Proxy

Now that you have mastered proxy