what a reverse proxy is (educational) — a checklist for infrastructure teams

what a reverse proxy is (educational) — a checklist for infrastructure teams

A reverse proxy is a server that sits between clients and one or more backend servers to forward client requests and return responses on behalf of those backends, and it commonly appears in front of web and API services to centralise control, terminate TLS and perform routing for multiple upstreams.

Its practical benefits include load distribution to improve capacity and availability, TLS termination to simplify certificate management, response caching to reduce backend load, request inspection for security filtering and URL rewriting for clean public endpoints, and these capabilities make a reverse proxy a fundamental component in modern infrastructure design.

Before deploying a reverse proxy, decide goals, assess traffic patterns and choose software that matches your operational model, and for further infrastructure topics you may find related Infrastructure posts useful to read at the Build & Automate site via this link related Infrastructure posts.

• Define objectives: specify whether the reverse proxy will provide load balancing, TLS termination, caching, authentication or API gateway features.
• Choose software: evaluate options such as Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy or Caddy against performance, feature set, configuration model and team familiarity.
• Plan networking: map public endpoints to upstream services, decide on IP addressing, hostname records and DNS TTLs for quick failover when needed.
• Secure TLS: adopt a certificate strategy, automate renewals and decide where to terminate TLS to balance security and backend simplicity.
• Preserve client identity: ensure X-Forwarded-For and other headers are correctly set to retain original client IPs for logging and access controls.
• Set health checks and timeouts: configure backend health probes, connection timeouts and retry behaviour to avoid cascading failures.
• Enable observability: turn on structured access logs, metrics and tracing integration to monitor latency, errors and throughput.
• Test thoroughly: exercise failover, certificate rotation and large payloads in a staging environment before production rollout.

When configuring request handling, pay attention to header behaviour and HTTP versions, and explicitly manage X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Host and similar headers to prevent upstream confusion while ensuring that HTTP/2 and keep-alive settings are compatible between client-facing and backend connections.

Operational considerations include logging and metrics collection, centralised log ingestion, alerting on error rates and latency, and capturing per-backend metrics so you can quickly identify which service needs attention when anomalies appear, and remember that tracing across the proxy and upstream services is often crucial for diagnosing complex request paths.

Finally, treat the reverse proxy configuration as code, store it in version control, include it in CI pipelines and plan staged rollouts with clear rollback procedures, and keep software up to date with security patches while documenting common operational tasks so that the team can maintain reliable routing and scale with confidence. For more builds and experiments, visit my main RC projects page.