The Proxy Playbook: Building Fast, Secure Middle Layers in Go

Proxies act as intermediaries between clients and servers, enabling load balancing, caching, security, and traffic management. Forward proxies work for clients to reach external servers, while reverse proxies sit in front of backend services to handle incoming traffic. Go's standard library provides simple tools for building both types - httputil.NewSingleHostReverseProxy for reverse proxies and http.Client for forward proxies. The guide covers practical implementation examples, best practices including timeout management and header handling, and real-world use cases in microservices architectures with API gateways and service meshes.