Proxy vs reverse proxy vs load balancer (2023) | Explained with real life examples

hello friends in this video we will understand what is the difference between a proxy server and a reverse proxy server I'm sure you must have worked with proxies a lot but this video is to simplify these concepts yet again in a very very easy to understand example so let's get started so in in our childhood whenever we wanted anything in our life we always went to a parent and asked for it and then it was up to the parents to decide whether that was a legitimate request or a demand to be fulfilled or not so

suppose you wanted a toy or an ice-cream you always thought that your parents are the ones who would fulfill those requests and actually that was true because your parents went outside and they got the stuff which you always asked for they never let the outside world come in contact with you because you were too small and that is how our parents shielded us from the rest of the world till the time we we were matured enough to handle it ourselves so just correlate this easy easy example with a proxy server so what is a proxy

proxy is an act which someone else does on your behalf if you take an example of United Kingdom there is a concept called as proxy voting so suppose if you are not able to vote go and vote yourself then someone else can vote on your behalf then that is called as a proxy vote even in our colleges many students used to do proxy attendance which is not correct and I am not endorsing it by any means but that was one of the ways where you can put a false attendance even if the actual student was

maybe chilling at home so all these are different examples to explain you how a proxy works proxy is an interface between you and the outside world so just replicate this into a system and then we will now exactly understand how it works proxy once we understand how it works it would be very easy for us for understand reverse proxy and exactly understand what is the difference between a proxy and a reverse proxy so in this diagram you can clearly see that proxies proxy server works for the safety of the client for the security of the

client so whenever you are making any requests from your client machine to hit a server which is present outside the network so this is your internal network so this is intranet and this is internet so suppose you are in a closed Network and you want to access something which is outside your network so proxy is the interface through which you send that request and then it goes to the internet and gets the data for you gets the request fulfilled for you it helps us in various ways and we will understand how first of all proxy

acts as a shield it acts as a filter between us and the network and it filters out all the bad stuff which could impact us sitting inside the network so proxy acts as a filter acts as a firewall so first it acts as a firewall the second advantage is that multiple clients can talk to the same proxy and it helps the proxy server manage all the requests at one place and then pass it on to the outside world and that as an organization gives you a better management of all your client machines which are talking

to the network and asking the data from outside so it is used for better management third point third point is as I said it protects you from cyber attacks from viruses malware which is pretty much what a firewall does so it saves you from any phishing attack and if any malware which could harm your data which can harm your system so security is the most important feature of a proxy port point performance how because proxy also helps for caching so what is caching suppose you are accessing a webpage over the Internet and that page is

a static page which multiple clients are requesting at the same time so once that particular request has been first from the server here in the proxy you can store that static page static content so the next time any other client machine ask for the same content rather than going to the back to the Internet proxy server can fulfill that request directly from its own premises so you you don't have to go and hit the internet again so it saves you the bandwidth and it gives you a very good performance fifth point which is very important

is encryption and decryption so whenever you send any requests through a proxy in order to provide you additional security in it can encrypt your request it can hide the IP address of your machine it can hide the sensitive data and it it only sends it you know in a way where you cannot be discovered within the network so suppose you send anything with your IP address to this particular proxy then proxy will send that request further by encrypting your IP address or hiding your masking your IP address to this particular server so this server does

not know from where exactly that particular request came from so now as we have understood what is a proxy server let's quickly understand what is a reverse proxy the concept is pretty pretty similar guys nothing nothing different from what a proxy does is just that it does it instead of doing it from the client side it does it from the server side so let us understand how so as you can see a reverse proxy server does exactly the opposite of what a proxy server does instead of protecting the client it rather protects the server so

this reverse proxy server comes handy whenever there is any request coming through the internet which wants to access any of your servers within the network so instead of exposing your servers so all these are your servers so it can be server one server two so three you rather put a reverse proxy in front of it and then wherever any request comes to access any of your web sites or any of your servers it has to go by a reverse proxy and then reverse proxy decides how to filter that request and send it forward now what

other benefits we have of using a reverse proxy server pretty much similar to what we have for a proxy server but this time round we also have an additional benefit which is called as load balancing so suppose you are trying to access amazon.com so when you are hitting amazon.com website the reverse proxy can load balance these requests because there will be multiple requests coming from several clients from the internet so the reverse proxy helps balance the load and it active works as a load balancer between the request and how it has to be load balanced

among the servers second benefit again similar to what proxy server does is caching so whenever there is multiple requests of a similar page then that caching happens in the reverse proxy and then the reverse proxy serves that content back to the client machine third advantage of using a reverse proxy server is again as I said security because all your servers IP addresses and everything is masked the this particular environment does not have a clue which particular server is being hit or being asked for another very important point of using a reverse proxy is that it

helps you compress the request size which helps you to increase the overall bandwidth and performance so suppose if there is a request which is coming via reverse proxy and then there is a response coming from the server this particular reverse proxy help in zip ping this particular request into a smaller size and then it fulfills it back to the client machine so it reduces the amount of data packet the size of the data packets which are crossing through the network to and fro and it helps income in compression so as you can see proxy server

and the reverse proxy server works pretty much the same way a very common question which people also ask is that what is the difference between a reverse proxy server and a load balancer because it can be very confusing so understand this guys that a reverse proxy server can be a load balancer as well but load balancer has a very definite purpose of balancing the load when there are too much too heavy requests coming in then the load balancer has to ensure that it balances the load across all the nodes in the cluster whereas a reverse

proxy server can still work with a single server in place it does not necessarily need to have multiple servers because your reverse proxy will still do the security part will still do the caching part for that particular server so a reverse proxy server can act as a load balancer so in this way you can understand that a load balancing mechanism can be a subset of a reverse proxy server so friends I hope you now understand what is a proxy server what is a reverse proxy server why it is used for and how it is different

from each other thank you so much for watching this video till the end I really hope you liked this video please go and subscribe to my channel I TK Funday and please hit the bell icon doog suggest any good content which I might bring in future thank you so much for watching and keep hustlin thank you [Music] you