Reverse Proxy

A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of one or more origin servers and handles incoming requests on their behalf. Clients connect to the reverse proxy as if it were the destination; the proxy then routes each request to the appropriate origin and returns the response.

This is the architecture behind Cloudflare, nginx as a load balancer, AWS Application Load Balancer, and most production web stacks. Reverse proxies handle TLS termination (so origin servers do not need to manage certificates), caching, compression, DDoS filtering, rate limiting, and routing across multiple backend servers.

The distinction from a “forward” proxy (what the rest of this glossary calls a “proxy”): forward proxies sit in front of CLIENTS to access servers; reverse proxies sit in front of SERVERS to handle clients. The two are unrelated technologies despite both being called proxies.