[simmervigor]

Proxy components are officially called Intermediaries in thr HTTP semantic specification; see https://httpwg.org/http-core/draft-ietf-httpbis-semantics-la....

Intermediaries can have different purposes. The official alternative to reverse proxy is "gateway", which is unfortunately overloaded with other kinds of gateways in networking.

Naming things is hard. Reverse proxy isn't great but all things considered is unique enough to allow folks to discriminate the sort of HTTP proxying that is happening

[westurner]

An HTTP reverse proxy forwards HTTP requests and adds e.g. X-Forwarded-For and X-Forwarded-Host headers.

https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/f... :

  X-Forwarded-For: 12.34.56.78, 23.45.67.89
  X-Real-IP: 12.34.56.78
  X-Forwarded-Host: example.com
  X-Forwarded-Proto: https

TIL from the nginx docs that there's a standardized way to forward HTTP without the X- prefix on the unregistered headers:

  Forwarded: for=12.34.56.78;host=example.com;proto=https, for=23.45.67.89

What is the difference between a reverse proxy and a load balancer?

k8s calls this "Ingress" and there are multiple "Ingress API" implementers; which essentially must reload the upstream server list on SIGHUP. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...

List of k8s Ingress Controllers: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...

[dilyevsky]

> What is the difference between a reverse proxy and a load balancer?

Reverse proxy may or may not loadbalance requests. For example, in a sidecar configuration it can just terminate tls, provide telemetry, etc and forward everything to local port.