It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize what the reverse proxy is. My brain got stuck on the fact that it is just proxying requests. What's so reverse about this? Silly.
It's one of the classic cases of a thing being named relative to what came before it, rather than being named on its own merit. This makes sense to people working at the time the new thing is introduced, but is confusing to every other learner in the future.
Could be worse. All the many things named after people prevalent in some fields more than in others, biology/medicine for example. When you read, for example, "loop of Henle" or "circle of Willis" you don't even know where to begin. You either know the term or not.
How about service proxy vs web proxy rather than reverse proxy and proxy? Makes more clear that one is a proxy on the service side and the other is a proxy on the client side. Service proxy and Client proxy might be even better.
HAProxy deserves a mention alongside those - it's particularly strong for high-traffic production environments where its advanced load balancing algorithms and detailed metrics shine.
Caddy has been excellent for me thus far as well. I'm using it on a VPS to reverse proxy to the services I run at home via a Tailscale tunnel. Coming from Nginx in the past Caddy was drop-dead simple to configure.
The entire config for each vhost is 3 lines, including the domain definition and closing brace - and that includes TLS!
I used to use Caddy for years and was active in the community.
I switched to Traefik for a few reasons: labels configuration (there is a parallel version of caddy maintained by somebody else that does it), how middleware are implemented and the dynamic capacities of Traefik.
Caddy is excellent, a brilliant piece of tech. For edge routing Traefik is worth at least considering.
I would say the bullet points at the top are not strictly correct. The response does not necessarily transit the proxy. Responses can be returned directly to the client (DSR).
Meta request: can we change the URL to the original source? This isn’t quite blogspam (since it’s the same author reposting the same piece onto Medium) but Medium is annoying enough that I’d still rather resolve to the original source
What's the difference between Reverse proxy and forward proxy? Is there something like "intermediate proxy"? Is this concept of L7 proxy, similar to DNAT/SNAT or Port forwarding in L3/L4?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadI definitely prefer Caddy in my experience, so far.
1: https://nginx.org/patches/dtls/
The entire config for each vhost is 3 lines, including the domain definition and closing brace - and that includes TLS!
I switched to Traefik for a few reasons: labels configuration (there is a parallel version of caddy maintained by somebody else that does it), how middleware are implemented and the dynamic capacities of Traefik.
Caddy is excellent, a brilliant piece of tech. For edge routing Traefik is worth at least considering.
Meta request: can we change the URL to the original source? This isn’t quite blogspam (since it’s the same author reposting the same piece onto Medium) but Medium is annoying enough that I’d still rather resolve to the original source