Load balancer vs API Gateway vs Reverse Proxy
2 min readMar 15, 2024
· Reverse Proxy
· API Gateway
· Load Balancer
· ALB + API Gateway — AWS
· ALB vs API Gateway
Reverse Proxy
- acts a intermediary between client request and group of servers/server (acts as public face for the server)
- forwards client request to the appropriate server and returns the server’s response to the client.
- ✅ increased security — hiding identity of backend server
- ✅ SSL termination
- ✅ Load distribution
- ✅ compression
- ✅ caching
API Gateway
- evolution in managing service oriented architectures
- acts a single point of entry for a collection of services
- handles tasks such as routing request, Authentication, Authorization, Monitoring and Rate limiting.
- API gateway are especially important in microservice architectures — provides unified interface for managing complexity of multiple services
- ensure secure and efficient communication between clients and services
Load Balancer
- LB balances incoming network requests across a group of backend servers
- ensures high availability and reliability by directing requests only to healthy servers
- can dynamically add or remove servers as request volumes fluctuates
- Uses various algorithms like — Round Robin, Least connection, IP hash to efficiently distribute client request and network load
- ❓Question — Do servers respond directly to client or via a load balancer? if via a load balancer then is load balancer is a reverse proxy?
- Steps for a load balancer —
> Picks Appserver
> Forward request to App server
> Receive Response from App server
> Forwards Response to Client
ALB + API Gateway — AWS
