Breaking down the concepts of reverse proxy, caching and serving files, load balancing, etc with nginx web server.
**proxy → dude that hides your identity**
Think of proxy as the middleman, imagine this example that you want to order some food but dont want the restaurent to know that it’s you, so you call and ask a friend to order for you through which your identity remains secret, here your friend is the nginx server. Let me explain why we do this and what it is in technicality.
Imagine that you are accessing a detective and youre going through sus websites on the internet, you dont want those sus websites to know your public-ip, location, etc. In this case you would use what we call a proxy server through which you will hit those sus website’s http/https server.
Proxy network has to be created, it is generally not deployed on home networks.
Forward Proxy → Hides your data from other http/https servers.
Reverse Proxy → Hides server information, data, whereabouts, ports, ip-addresses from the clients that are accessing it.
Now nginx is a high performance web server and a reverse proxy server. It’s mainly used to serve websites, handle simultaneous requests on served websites and manage traffic efficiently. Basically a smarter http/https server.