A reverse proxy is a web server that centralizes internal services and provides unified interfaces to the public. Requests from clients are forwarded to a server that can fulfill it before the reverse proxy returns the server's response to the client.
Additional benefits include:
***Increased security** - Hide information about backend servers, blacklist IPs, limit number of connections per client
***Increased scalability and flexibility** - Clients only see the reverse proxy's IP, allowing you to scale servers or change their configuration
***SSL termination** - Decrypt incoming requests and encrypt server responses so backend servers do not have to perform these potentially expensive operations
* Removes the need to install [X.509 certificates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.509) on each server
***Compression** - Compress server responses
***Caching** - Return the response for cached requests
* Deploying a load balancer is useful when you have multiple servers. Often, load balancers route traffic to a set of servers serving the same function.
* Reverse proxies can be useful even with just one web server or application server, opening up the benefits described in the previous section.
* Solutions such as NGINX and HAProxy can support both layer 7 reverse proxying and load balancing.
### Disadvantage(s): reverse proxy
* Introducing a reverse proxy results in increased complexity.
* A single reverse proxy is a single point of failure, configuring multiple reverse proxies (ie a [failover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failover)) further increases complexity.
### Source(s) and further reading
*[Reverse proxy vs load balancer](https://www.nginx.com/resources/glossary/reverse-proxy-vs-load-balancer/)
