Beginners guide to gateways and proxies

Photo by William Bout on Unsplash

Have you heard of gateways, proxies (forward and reverse), load balancers, API gateways? You probably did, and even if you haven’t you might have heard of products such as nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, Gloo, Kong, Ambassador, and many others. You are probably using gateways each time without even knowing it.

A gateway usually lives between clients and backing applications or services…