Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

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Proxy, Reverse Proxy, Load Balancer, VPN and DNS

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

  1. socks proxy

  2. sshuttle is a poor man's VPN.

Expose Local Service to Public

Good Choices of Reverse Proxies

Proxy vs VPN

  1. When you connect to a VPN, all traffic will be routed through the VPN. You don't have the option to route part of the traffic through the VPN. On the other hand, a proxy server is more flexible. It is easy to route some specific traffic through a proxy server. As a matter of fact, there are many different types of proxy corresponding to different traffic type, e.g., http proxy, socks proxy, ftp proxy, etc. Generally speaking, a specific type of traffic can only be visisted using the right type of proxy server. For example, a FTP server can only be visited with a FTP proxy.

  2. A proxy server is not as secure as a VPN. However, a proxy server can be used to visit web sites anonymously.

Proxy vs Reverse Proxy

  1. When a client C visits a server S using proxy P, the server S knows the proxy P (but not the client C) who visists it. When a client C visits a server S which uses a reverse proxy R that balancing traffic to servers S1 and S2 (load balancing), the client C know only knows the server S but does not know underlying servers S1 and S2.

  2. A proxy can be used for caching, anonymity, logging, blocking sites and microservices while a reverse proxy can be used for caching, load balancing, ingress, canary deployment and miroservices.

  3. Proxy and Reverse Proxy can be used together.

For more discussions, please refer to Proxy vs Reverse Proxy Server Explained .

Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy

Load Balancing is one application (special case) of reverse proxy. For more discussions, please refer to Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy (Explained by Example) .

References

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