Load Balancers & Reverse Proxies (nginx)

What a reverse proxy actually is, why you put nginx in front of your app, how load balancing spreads traffic across instances, and what nginx really does in production - TLS, gzip, caching, and rate limiting.

1. What a Reverse Proxy Is A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of your app and forwards requests to it - the public front door that handles TLS, serves static files, and hides your app behind one clean entry point.
2. Load Balancing When one app instance can't handle the traffic, the proxy spreads requests across a pool of identical instances - with health checks to skip the dead ones and a strategy like round-robin or least-connections to decide who gets the next request.
3. What nginx Does in Practice The jobs nginx actually does day to day in front of your app - terminating TLS/HTTPS, gzip compression, caching static assets, and rate limiting - plus the everyday skill of testing and reloading config safely without restarting and dropping connections.