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Reverse proxy deep dive(medium.com)
91 points by miggy 9 days ago | 38 comments
  • philwelch4 days ago

    Original, Medium-free URL is https://startwithawhy.com/reverseproxy/2024/01/15/ReversePro...

    Meta request: can we change the URL to the original source? This isn’t quite blogspam (since it’s the same author reposting the same piece onto Medium) but Medium is annoying enough that I’d still rather resolve to the original source

    • imcotton4 days ago |parent

      Thanks, I have being putting medium domain into dns blocklist for years.

      • mdaniel4 days ago |parent

        The alternative is the amazing scribe.rip -> https://scribe.rip/@mitendra_mahto/cross-posted-from-https-s...

        • Quarrel4 days ago |parent

          Wow. Thanks for this. Setting up redirects now.

          Medium is terrible.

          • luckman2123 days ago |parent

            How do you set up those automatic redirects if I might ask?

            • Quarrela day ago |parent

              In the end I just used a greasemonkey script. There are several on greasyfork.

  • MortyWaves5 days ago

    Caddy, Nginx, Traefik seem to be the most popular reverse proxies in the self hosting/homelab communities.

    I definitely prefer Caddy in my experience, so far.

    • ethan_smith5 days ago |parent

      HAProxy deserves a mention alongside those - it's particularly strong for high-traffic production environments where its advanced load balancing algorithms and detailed metrics shine.

      • p_ing4 days ago |parent

        I would argue this is the best mainstream proxy. Even better when paired with OpenBSD and CARP.

    • somehnguy4 days ago |parent

      Caddy has been excellent for me thus far as well. I'm using it on a VPS to reverse proxy to the services I run at home via a Tailscale tunnel. Coming from Nginx in the past Caddy was drop-dead simple to configure.

      The entire config for each vhost is 3 lines, including the domain definition and closing brace - and that includes TLS!

      • MortyWaves4 days ago |parent

        Just curious if you have Caddy running in Docker or normal?

        • somehnguy4 days ago |parent

          Caddy is in docker via compose

    • joshbaptiste5 days ago |parent

      Trying out ferron recently as a reverse proxy https://www.ferronweb.org/.. config is super simple

    • BrandoElFollito4 days ago |parent

      I used to use Caddy for years and was active in the community.

      I switched to Traefik for a few reasons: labels configuration (there is a parallel version of caddy maintained by somebody else that does it), how middleware are implemented and the dynamic capacities of Traefik.

      Caddy is excellent, a brilliant piece of tech. For edge routing Traefik is worth at least considering.

    • lowwave5 days ago |parent

      Is there a reverse proxies that can support DTLS support out of box without some kind experimental patch[1]?

      1: https://nginx.org/patches/dtls/

  • jeffbee5 days ago

    I would say the bullet points at the top are not strictly correct. The response does not necessarily transit the proxy. Responses can be returned directly to the client (DSR).

    • nyrikki4 days ago |parent

      > Note: For simplicity, we’ll focus on Layer 7 (HTTP) reverse proxy.

      Layer 4 proxies are a very specific sometimes food that most people should actively avoid until they need it because of the tradeoffs.

      DSR is layer 4, and not in scope of this post.

      • jeffbee4 days ago |parent

        Your comment, to me, only points out that the OSI layer model is nonsense. Envoy in DSR mode routes traffic based on application features, at "layer 7".

        • nyrikki4 days ago |parent

          Envoy calls it Layer 4

          https://blog.envoyproxy.io/introduction-to-modern-network-lo...

          • jeffbee4 days ago |parent

            That's fair. Of course that post also calls the OSI model "unfortunate" and "a poor approximation".

            • nyrikki3 days ago |parent

              All models are wrong, some are useful.

              Layer 4 to 7 is useful in this case, as layer 4 involves forging tcp/udp packets, which is vastly different than say a http level reverse proxy.

              • thequux3 days ago |parent

                If you actually read ITU T-REC X.200, which specifies the OSI model, you'll find that it doesn't match the modern internet at all. E.g., we don't have an OSI-style transport protocol at all (connections themselves aren't addressable independent of the SSAPs), TCP and UDP are actually layer 5, the presentation layer is protocol-specific, and pretty much the entire stack falls to bits if the network layer isn't packet switched.

                There's a separate term for the bits of the OSI model that are actually relevant; it's called the IETF model.

        • philwelch4 days ago |parent

          The model itself isn’t nonsense because it’s not a model of load balancers; it’s a model of network protocols. Load balancers might handle multiple levels of the stack for the same traffic, but so does any other networked program, eg handling cross-domain redirects.

  • tdiff5 days ago

    Really looks like an ai-generated overview.

  • raincom4 days ago

    What's the difference between Reverse proxy and forward proxy? Is there something like "intermediate proxy"? Is this concept of L7 proxy, similar to DNAT/SNAT or Port forwarding in L3/L4?

    • p_ing4 days ago |parent

      TL;DR: Forward Proxy == protects clients; Reverse Proxy == protects server

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server#Forward_proxy_vs....

  • vojtechrichter5 days ago

    Amazing read, I personally find it fascinating to make my own load balancer.

  • shelajev9 days ago

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize what the reverse proxy is. My brain got stuck on the fact that it is just proxying requests. What's so reverse about this? Silly.

    • happytoexplain5 days ago |parent

      It's one of the classic cases of a thing being named relative to what came before it, rather than being named on its own merit. This makes sense to people working at the time the new thing is introduced, but is confusing to every other learner in the future.

      • raincom4 days ago |parent

        What came before "reverse proxies"? Just curious to understand the history.

        • p_ing4 days ago |parent

          Forward proxies, proxies where client machines were configured to route all their outbound traffic through (similar to a router). Usually performed caching back in the day when the Internet tube was slow, later on got SSL decryption capabilities and filtering lists to make sure you stay off of your naughty sites and so the proxy admin could decrypt your banking credentials.

      • nosianu5 days ago |parent

        Could be worse. All the many things named after people prevalent in some fields more than in others, biology/medicine for example. When you read, for example, "loop of Henle" or "circle of Willis" you don't even know where to begin. You either know the term or not.

        • happytoexplain5 days ago |parent

          True, though I think it's often a larger challenge to capture the intrinsic quality of a medicinal compound or physiological feature than a man-made tool.

    • azaras5 days ago |parent

      Nowadays, "reverse" is suppressed in most ways. I have heard that Nginx is a proxy more often than a reverse proxy.

      • daveguy5 days ago |parent

        How about service proxy vs web proxy rather than reverse proxy and proxy? Makes more clear that one is a proxy on the service side and the other is a proxy on the client side. Service proxy and Client proxy might be even better.

      • Valodim5 days ago |parent

        Except in the configuration where you use the reversep_proxy directive, of course

    • rini179 days ago |parent

      Since web proxy was originally used near clients, caching stuff to save precious bandwidth of their kbps-tier connection.

  • leptons5 days ago

    [flagged]