Reverse proxy vs load balancer: stop mixing them up (before prod takes the hit)
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Reverse proxies and load balancers serve different purposes despite often being confused. Reverse proxies act as front-door bouncers handling TLS termination, caching, and WAF rules, while load balancers distribute traffic across multiple servers for high availability. The article provides practical Nginx configurations,
Table of contents
Health checks (the silent killer)Timeouts (death by default)Sticky sessions (aka “when NAT ruins your day”)“But nginx can do both”Sort: