"Reverse proxies are the unsung workhorses of internet-scale infrastructure. They terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS), defend against denial of service (DoS), balance load, cache responses, and connect rapidly evolving services. Whether you call it a load balancer, edge proxy, API gateway, or Kubernetes ingress controller, this layer is where all traffic converges, and, more often than we would like to admit, where it breaks."
"They terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS), defend against denial of service (DoS), balance load, cache responses, and connect rapidly evolving services. The trouble is that proxies rarely fail in clean, textbook ways. Instead, they fail when an optimization that shines in a benchmark collapses under real workloads and when a missing comma in metadata silently takes down live traffic."
"Optimization is contextual. An optimization that speeds up one proxy on sixteen cores may grind to a halt on sixty-four due to lock contention. Always profile on your target hardware for your target workload. The mundane kills scale. Outages rarely come from exotic bugs. They come from missed commas, file descriptor limits, and watchdog failures. Test and monitor the boring details relentlessly."
Reverse proxies handle TLS termination, DoS mitigation, load balancing, caching, and connectivity for incoming traffic. Optimizations that look good in benchmarks can fail under real workloads and at different scales due to contention. Simple operational issues — missing commas, file descriptor limits, and watchdog failures — commonly cause outages. Keeping the common request path lean reduces risk from exceptions and abstractions. Empirical profiling and instrumentation of hot paths expose hidden CPU costs and mismeasured dependencies. Clear monitoring of mundane limits and designing for human operability with simple commands and logs improves outage recovery.
Read at InfoQ
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