In the world of web architecture, efficient traffic management is crucial for ensuring availability, performance, and security. Four key components that facilitate this are load balancers, reverse proxies, forward proxies, and API gateways. Let’s break down each of these elements and their use cases.
Load Balancer
A load balancer is responsible for distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers. This distribution enhances the availability, scalability, and performance of applications. Operating at either Layer 4 (Transport) or Layer 7 (Application) of the OSI model, load balancers ensure that no single server becomes overwhelmed with requests.
