Stage 1 · Lesson 6 of 10
Reverse proxies and API gateways
A sits in front of your servers and handles requests on their behalf. It can terminate TLS (decrypt secure traffic), compress responses, cache static files and deal with slow clients so your servers do not wait on them. It also hides how your servers are laid out inside.
Nginx, Envoy and are common examples, and most are reverse proxies too. An API gateway is a reverse proxy with API jobs added. These include checking who the caller is (), each client, sending each request to the right backend service, and sometimes combining several responses into one. Put this shared work there so every service does not rebuild it.
Common trapletting the gateway grow business logic, at which point it becomes a shared monolith every team must change and deploy, and a bottleneck that needs its own scaling and redundancy.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking System Design Fundamentals
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
Load balancing, API gateway, proxies, caching, CAP and Bloom filters: week 1 of the plan in order
- GitHub repoFreeThe System Design Primer
Donne Martin · Intermediate
Free: its scalability, latency, availability, CDN, load balancer and cache sections
Keep handy
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