Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy: Traffic Distribution vs Request Mediation
Overview A load balancer spreads incoming traffic across many identical backend servers so no single machine gets overwhelmed, while a reverse proxy sits in front of one or more servers to mediate, secure, and transform requests on their behalf. The two overlap heavily in practice — most modern reverse proxies (NGINX, Envoy, HAProxy) can also load balance — but the distinction matters when you’re deciding which capability you actually need to configure or scale for. ...