What is a Reverse Proxy used for?

A reverse proxy serves various purposes in a network infrastructure, particularly in managing and optimizing the delivery of web applications. Its primary role is to act as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from servers, thereby providing a solution for scalable back-end infrastructure with reduced resource consumption.

By distributing incoming requests to multiple back-end servers, a reverse proxy can balance load effectively. This ensures that no single server becomes a bottleneck, enhancing the overall performance and reliability of web services. Furthermore, it can cache responses from servers, which reduces the need to repeatedly process identical requests, allowing for faster response times and less resource usage.

In addition to load balancing, a reverse proxy can also provide SSL termination, which offloads the encryption and decryption tasks from the back-end servers. This allows those servers to focus on processing application logic rather than handling secure connections, further optimizing resource utilization.

Moreover, while some of the other mentioned options touch on aspects of network management and security, they do not capture the core functionality of a reverse proxy as thoroughly as the ability to facilitate scalable architecture with reduced resource footprint.