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A forward proxy regulates client access to the internet, enhancing security and policy enforcement within an internal network.A reverse proxy, manages external requests to servers, offering load balancing and concealing server identities for added security. While forward proxies protect internal clients, reverse proxies safeguard servers form external access and threats.

Forward Proxy

Forward Proxy acts as middleman between client and servers on internet. It intercept requests from client to remote servers, and then determines whether to intercept or release them depending on how the configurations are set.

If the request is allowed, it's forwarded to the remote server. From the servers' point of view, the requests are from proxy. It cause servers send reply to proxy's IP address. As soon servers send back a reply, proxy will identify the response, and send back that response to the client that issued the request.

Normally, a forward proxy works with firewall to enforce se policy, such as content filtering, URL filtering and user acess to remote sites.

Reverse Proxy

The same as forward proxy, reverse proxy alse acts as middleman. However, in this work structure, now servers are the inner internet.

The reverse proxy intercepts incoming requests from the internet, presumably from clients outside the internal network. If the requests meet the reverse proxy’s access control policies, they are forwarded to the destination backend servers running in the internal network.

Load Balancing

In enterprise-level and high-availability architectures, one of the most core and important applications of reverse proxy is load balancing.

Reverse proxy for load balancing: Nginx forwards requests to multiple backend server clusters

-> Hadoop