Gateway vs load-balancer vs reverse-proxy 28 Sep 2017
What is the difference between an api-gateway, a load balancer and a reverse proxy ? Here is my attempt to provide a synthetic synthetic answer. Note that the features below are not mutualy exlusive…
| could provide | talks to | improves | OSI layer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reverse-proxy | caching compression ssl |
1 server | security (1) flexibility (2) performance |
4 or 7 |
| Load-balancer | load balancing session-persistence health check circuit-breaker |
many servers | scalability (3) availability (4) |
4 or 7 |
| API-gateway | API composition authentication |
many servers | payload (5) roundtrips |
7 |
- (1) by exposing only proxy to the internet
- (2) by enabling re-configuration of infra
- (3) by supporting more incoming requests
- (4) by providing redundancy
- (5) both in terms of network bandwith and DTO structure for app consumption
Non-exhaustive list of products
OSI Layers
- Application
- Presentation
- Session
- Transport
- Network
- Data link
- Physical