Reverse Proxy and Forward Proxy Vernacular (What's a Reverse Proxy Good For)

reverse proxy

A reverse proxy is a proxy server that forwards requests to a server in an internal network and returns the results from the server to the requesting client. In layman's terms, this means that the user accesses a proxy server, which forwards the request to the real server and then returns the results from the server to the user. The advantage of this is that you can hide the real server information and only expose the proxy server information to the outside world, thus improving security.

What does a reverse proxy do?

Reverse proxies serve to improve the security and availability of the system. In practice, reverse proxies are often used to protect the security of the internal network, such as fire prevention, load balancing and other functions can be realized through reverse proxies. In addition, the reverse proxy can also realize cache acceleration, SSL acceleration, content filtering and other functions, thus improving the performance and stability of the system.

"`javascript
// Example of a Node.js implementation of a reverse proxy
const http = require('http');
const httpProxy = require('http-proxy');

// Create a reverse proxy service
const proxy = httpProxy.createProxyServer({});

// Listen for requests from proxy servers
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
// Reverse proxy to target server
proxy.web(req, res, { target: 'http://localhost:9000' });
}).listen(8000);
“`

Through the above code example, we can see that through the Node.js http module and http-proxy module can easily implement a reverse proxy server, thus improving the security and availability of the system. This is also a reflection of the reverse proxy in practical applications.