What is a Reverse Proxy? 4 Key Uses

A reverse proxy acts as a representative of the server end to keep their identity  from the network with the proxy addresses. This proxy type receives incoming requests from the client side and responds to them back on behalf of the server. 

Proxy servers usually assists applications with simplifying and automating the process of scraping data. Data extraction becomes easier with proxies, as they provide access to all sorts of locations and operate at high speed. Proxies act as intermediary devices between the nodes in the network and can route the information to the destination by hiding the identity of the devices.

Reverse proxies work to ensure protection to the server side of the communication. Reverse proxy services act as an internal server, where the proxy works on behalf of the backend servers. A reverse proxy sits in front of the web servers to keep the identity of the servers under wraps. Reverse proxies receive incoming requests from clients and return them with a response from web servers. The clients will only know the intermediate reverse proxy they are communicating with. This helps web servers to stay anonymous from public internet users and can prevent overcrowding of the official web servers.

Forward proxy servers concentrate on protecting the client’s side while basic reverse proxy servers protect the backend server. The proxy server forwards requests from the client to the internet network with their proxy address. So, other servers will not know the source location of the request. This helps clients avoid IP blockades. They can scrape information at high speeds across any geographical location. Reverse proxy servers receive requests from the client as internal servers and route the response from the server to the client. By this, the reverse proxy protects the identity of the server. For example, some popular business institutions will have many clients or visitors on their websites. To control overcrowding in their website’s origin server, they use reverse proxies as their representative to pass the information people request without letting the people directly access their sites. 

The reverse proxy has two types according to their functionalities and usage. Though all the reverse proxies are similar in the working model, they may vary with some unique features to distinguish themselves from the basic reverse proxy.

The regular reverse proxies are used for security purposes, like maintaining a secured environment of the web servers by using the reverse proxy to communicate with people rather than exposing their true IP addresses. These reverse proxies receive incoming requests from the clients, forward them to the servers, and return the response from the server back to the clients.

Load balancers are also a type of reverse proxy and they represent the server-side, as well as handle multiple web servers. When the communication network has more than backend servers, load balancers will also take care of splitting tasks among the servers. This type is responsible for the even distribution of loads among the servers. This process optimizes resources and reduces processing time. 

Popular websites with a huge market value in the field may have millions in traffic on their servers, and the popularity can keep on increasing day by day. Here comes a situation where websites cannot handle the huge mass of traffic with a single backend server and the page loads start to take time. They can eventually end up using multiple servers to handle the incoming traffic. Load balancing reverse proxies help the website handle one or more servers with a load balancer solution. This load balancing technique performs traffic routing by forwarding the incoming requests to another server when the initial one is overloaded. This makes use of the available back-end server at that moment to serve client requests.

This global load balancer is more relevant to general load balancing servers in the case of distributing traffic among the servers. The difference is that the global server load balancer can distribute globally client requests among the servers. This benefit of using any server around the globe can help servers to use the nearest possible server to process incoming traffic and respond to them. This method decreases the distance and time for the clients and servers. 

In the client-server communication model, encryption takes a major role. The origin servers have to decrypt the requests from the client and send the responses in encrypted form. This may be a tedious process for the original server, which takes care of all the backend processes. To ease this encryption process, the reverse proxy can auto-encrypt and decrypt messages.

Reverse proxies are the most suitable processes to use to protect business people from Distributed Denial Of Services (DDOS) Attacks. This attack is a cybercrime in which the attackers target the web server and dump them with loads of requests. So, the web server crashes, finding it hard to withstand the bombarding web traffic. To handle these DDOS attacks, reverse proxies help by acting as an intermediary between the attackers and the server side. As all the web traffic goes through the proxy gateway, it only allows normal and organic traffic to get through them and prevents malicious traffic from reaching the server. Instead, they use the caching system to cache the response from the actual web server and send them to the clients through the reverse proxy server. This helps them to prevent suspicious emails or messages by using cryptography techniques. 

When intermediate servers forward incoming requests to the web server, collect the response from the web server, and deliver the response to the client. These internal servers also record the copy of the response as cache memory. Some frequent requests from clients will have the same responses and so reverse proxies can cache the response and reply to clients with a quick reply without reaching the origin server every time.