Reverse proxy

Terminates TLS and forwards requests to upstreams; often also compresses and caches.

Problem it solves: Centralises TLS, routing rules and connection management in front of apps.

Where it sits: Between the edge and application servers.

When to use

  • Path/host routing, TLS termination, connection pooling.

When not to use

  • As a substitute for a replicated LB tier.

Failure modes

  • Connection pool exhaustion under slow upstreams.

Metrics to watch

  • Upstream latency (ms)
  • Active connections

Alternatives

  • Load balancer
  • API gateway

Configuration in Labs (illustrative defaults)

  • Instances (count) = 2 — Identical copies behind this logical component. Capacity scales linearly in this model.
  • Capacity per instance (req/s) = 50000 — Maximum requests one instance completes per second before it saturates.
  • Base service time (ms) = 1 — Processing time per request at zero load. Queueing adds to this as utilisation rises.
  • Health checks (0 / 1) = 1 — 1 = only route to healthy children (failover). 0 = keep sending a share to failed children.

In the guide